A new approach to notating beatbox vocal percussion in line with traditional staff notation
MSc Computer Science (University of Hertfordshire); MMus (Boston University); BEd (University of Queensland); BMus (Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University); LTCL (Trinity College London).
Nicola Jane is a professionally trained vocalist and a London-based composer for film and theatre. She produces fully orchestrated hardcopy scores and piano reductions for live theatre/synchronised cinema orchestra, and engineers digital soundtracks for film and audio media.
Prior to her pursuits in media composition, Nicola was Artistic Director of the London-based Travesty Theatre Company, promoting new musical theatre projects from 2004 – 2007, before an extended time working abroad in Japan, producing original musical drama projects in English for Tokyo-based youth performing arts programs, and in the USA, where she composed and orchestrated for musical theatre projects in New York, Connecticut and Illinois. In 2007 and 2010, Nicola received sponsorship from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group Theatres for concert showcases of her musical theatre writing in the Grand Saloon at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London Covent Garden. From 2015-2017, she produced a series of short film scores for festival competitions across Europe and North America, including CINE Golden Eagle, Forum Filmmusik, World Soundtrack Academy and Moondance International.
From 2011, Nicola started to investigate tempo control of electronic music additions during live performance, with a focus on modern theatre-based music composition. She maintains an online blog of her part-time research and experiments on the topic, as well as methods for its hardcopy notation at Real Time Tempo Control. Her pursuit of Beatbox Code Notation method has evolved as a result of findings during this research in 2018.