Professor John Sloboda is Emeritus Professor at the Guildhall School, where he was founder of its Institute for Social Impact Research in the Performing Arts. He was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project "Music for Social Impact: Practitioners' contexts, work, and beliefs" from 2020-2023, and from 2009-2019 led Guildhall School's "Understanding Audiences" research programme. He is Emeritus Professor at Keele and was a staff member of the School of Psychology at Keele from 1974-2008, where he was Director of its Unit for the Study of Musical Skill and Development, founded in 1991. John is internationally known for his work on the psychology of music. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and has been President of both the Psychology and General Sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as President of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. He served a 3-year term as founding President of www.simm-platform.eu, an international platform for research into the Social Impact of Making Music. He was the recipient of the 1998 British Psychological Society's Presidents Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge, and in 2004 he was elected to Fellowship of the British Academy. In 2018, he was awarded an OBE for his services to psychology and music. His books include Handbook of Music and Emotion (co-edited with Patrik Juslin), and Exploring the Musical Mind, both published by Oxford University Press. He continues a close association with Guildhall School, where he is currently co-supervising three doctoral students.
Tregear, Peter, Geir Johansen, Harald Jørgensen, John A Sloboda, Helena Tulve, and Richard Wistreich. "Conservatoires in society: Institutional challenges and possibilities for change." Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15, 03-Apr (2016), 276-292.
Sloboda, John A. "Can music teaching be a powerful tool for social justice?." In Oxford Handbook of Social Justice, edited by C. Benedict, P. Schmidt, G. Spruce, & P. Woodford, 539-547 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Sloboda, John A. "The Composer and the Audience." In Beyond Britten: The Composer and the Community, edited by Peter Wiegold & Ghislaine Kenyon, 175-189 Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2015.
James, Mirjam, and John A Sloboda. "Professional classical musicians' awareness of and interactions with their audience: a survey study" presented at the Ninth Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Manchester, 2015.
Sloboda, John A. "One Equal Voice." In Beyond Britten: The Composer and the Community, edited by Peter Wiegold & Ghislaine Kenyon, 214-219 Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2015.
Dobson, M C, and John A Sloboda. "Staying behind: explorations in post-performance musician-audience dialogue.." In Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience, SEMPRE Studies in the Psychology of Music, edited by K. Burland & S. Pitts, 159-173 Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
Dolan, David and John A Sloboda, et al.. "The improvisatory approach to classical music performance: An empirical investigation into its characteristics and impact." In Music Performance Research, Vol. 6: 1-38, 2013.
Brand, Gail, John A Sloboda, Ben Saul, and Martin Hathaway. "The reciprocal relationship between jazz musicians and audiences in live performances: A pilot qualitative study." Psychology of Music: Sempre 40, 5 (2012), 634-651.
Van Zijl, Anemone, and John A Sloboda. "Performers’ experienced emotions in the construction of expressive musical performance: an exploratory investigation." Psychology of Music 39, 2 (2010), 196-219.
Juslin, Patrik, and John A Sloboda, ed. Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.