Brittney Allen is a musician, music educator, and PhD student within the Augmented Instruments Lab at Imperial College London.

A native Southern Californian, has obtained her B.M. and M.M. in Music Education from Howard University. While at Howard, Brittney Allen performed alongside Deepak Ram, Holly Hoffman, Ali Ryerson, Nicole Mitchell, and James Spaulding. An active educator and freelancer (having performed as first flutist with the Colour of Music Festival in Charleston, S.C. in previous years), Brittney Allen actively seeks opportunities to develop her musicianship and skill-set as an educator - most notably, Ms. Allen actively performed and participated as a part of Imani Wind’s 2015 Chamber Music Festival and Project Trio’s 2016 Teacher Training Workshop. Brittney taught applied flute at Bowie State University (after having previously taught the Blues as a Cultural Art Form at the University of Maryland), served as lead orchestra instructor for the Children’s Orchestra of D.C., directed and conducted the Premiere Wind Ensemble of the DC Youth Orchestra Program and performed freelance within the Washington, D.C. metro area.

After over a decade of performance and education within the Washington, DC metropolitan area, Brittney enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology to pursue a career in music technology. There, she developed and presented professional development and learning materials for music technology educators and students in the state of Georgia, worked in-house with local elementary and high school music technology educators to create and deliver STEAM education and materials to school-aged children, and began laying the foundation for her culturally situated research at Imperial College.

Deeply interested in the socio-cultural implications of digital music instrument design, her current research explores design philosophies and methodologies that are attentive to the expression of self, a “digital craftsmanship” approach to DMI design, and design artifacts that aid in the articulation of challenging issues by making the contributing aspects of the issues tangible. 

Outside of her research, Brittney enjoys learning about and practicing tapestry weaving, long distance cycling, creative coding, and bouldering, and most likely any video game that can be considered “cozy.”

Ongoing Work:

BRAIDS_ is a tangible, culturally situated NIME based upon the Black American hair braiding tradition whereby user-placed strands form braided structures that dictate a musical sequence. The many components of BRAIDS_ - capacitive sensing cores, Arduino microcontroller, digital representation, TouchOSC interface, and Pure Data synthesizer and sequencer - define a performance practice rooted in cultural diversity and exploration.  

Upcoming Projects:

LOOM: a reimagining of a loom/tapestry cartoon as a graphic score

AAVE (African American Vernacular English) Melodica: an exploration of spoken language and textual communication as a means for musicking.

Fractal Pd: A Truchet tile-inspired approach to generative music composition in pure data based upon Ron Eglash’ work on African fractals.

— B.M. Music Education + M.M Music Education, Howard University
— M.S. Music Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology