Dr Amy Skjerseth BM, BA, MA, PhD

Personal Statement

Dr Amy Skjerseth joined the University of Liverpool in June 2022 as Lecturer in Audiovisual Media. Amy is also co-director of the MA Music and Audiovisual Media Program along with Dr Andrew Simmons. Just prior to teaching at Liverpool, Amy received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago. She has her MA in English from McGill University, a BA in English from the University of Rochester, and a BM in Oboe Performance from the Eastman School of Music.

Amy is currently working on two monographs. The first, Audiovisual Thinking: Visual Waves of Popular Music, is based on research from her doctoral thesis and explores how technological innovations influenced both musical and visual culture. Visual Waves of Music tells an audiovisual history of popular music from 1960s transistor radios and the 1980s Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument to 1990s Auto-Tune and present-day vocaloids and deepfakes. Amy’s second book is titled The Feminist Wall of Sound, which reroutes the story of the normally male-coded wall of sound by its creator Phil Spector and bands like The Beach Boys and The Beatles to the women that Spector produced, like Ronnie Spector and Tina Turner. The book also puts technological agency in the hands of Karen Carpenter and Yoko Ono, who aren’t normally thought of as controlling their magnetic tape overdubbing, and continues on to others who develop the concept of the wall of sound, including Enya, Billie Eilish, and Raye.

Amy’s further research examines how devices from automata to deepfakes shape audiovisual cultures. Her work on sound and media history and culture has been published in journals from Film Criticism and Radio Journal to the Journal of Popular Music Studies and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. Amy was an active member of the sound studies community in Chicago, having co-coordinated the Sound and Society Workshop at UChicago from 2017–19 as well as the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies from 2019–2022. She also engages practice as research as a co-producer of the sound studies podcast Phantom Power: A Podcast on the Sound Arts and Humanities and as a producer of audio and audiovisual essays.