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Dr. Ellen Waterman

Professor Ellen Waterman

Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada

  • 613-520-2600

Ellen Waterman is a Professor of Music in the School for Studies in Art and Culture.

Waterman is a music and sound studies scholar and flutist whose socially engaged research involves collaboration with other scholars, artists and community groups.

She helped build the field of critical improvisation studies through the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation and was a founding co-editor of Critical
Studies in Improvisation/Etudes critiques en improvisation
.

At Carleton, Waterman is the director of Music, Sound and Society in Canada (MSSC), an interdisciplinary research centre exploring the complex ways that music and sound are shaped by, and help to shape, our society.

Launched in 2021 and committed to community-engaged scholarship and researchcreation for social transformation, the MSSC brings together a large and diverse cohort of research fellows, collaborators and community members.

This list includes Carleton Music Professor Jesse Stewart, recently named a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and Film Studies Professor Kester Dyer, who produced an Indigenous Media Making Summer Institute with Wapikoni Mobile and the MSSC in 2023.

Through the MSSC, Waterman is the Principal Investigator on two major research projects: The Resonance Project and Expanding the Music Circle.

The Resonance Project explores the nature of interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts,
as professional and community musicians work together to co-create music in response
to two group exhibitions at the Carleton University Art Gallery.

Meanwhile, the Expanding the Music Circle project seeks to develop a networked
musical improvisation pedagogy in collaboration with orchestra musicians, special
music educators and adults with exceptionalities