Shelley Brunt

Shelley is Associate Professor, and Program Manager for the BA (Music Industry) degree.

As a popular music ethnomusicologist, Shelley focuses on ethnographic approaches to examining music cultures in Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Many of her academic publications can be found in RMIT's Research Repository, including the books Made in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand: Studies in Popular Music (with G.Stahl Routledge, 2018), and Popular Music and Parenting (with L.Giuffre Routledge, 2023), which concerns the shared experiences of listening, media engagement, and music participation between caregivers and young children. She speaks about this latter topic in her podcast "Music Mothers and Others" co-hosted with Liz Giuffre (University of Technology Sydney) and broadcast on Sydney's 2SERfm and musicmothersandothers.com. Her show was a finalist in the 2021 CBAA Community Radio Awards in the category 'Excellence in Innovative Programming and Content', which recognises innovative programming or content initiatives that gives a platform to music, ideas, or concepts not normally addressed by traditional media outlets and connects deeply with its audience.

Shelley's creative musical practice is varied. She is a retired cellist and chorister, and performed as a guitarist, keyboardist and singer in bands during the 1990s–2000s, before performing Javanese gamelan (‘Puspawarna Gamelan’) and Japanese taiko ('ODaiko') from 2008–2012 in New Zealand. Shelley now plays regularly in Australia as a member of the Balinese Gamelan ensemble Gamelan DanAnda.

Shelley recently completed The Encore Project with Catherine Strong and Fabian Canizzo. Encore is an Australian research and industry intervention initiative, funded by the Australian Government's National Careers Institute, and conducted in partnership with the Victorian Music Development Office (VMDO), the Australasian Performing Right Association and the Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (APRA AMCOS), and the Australian Music Centre. Encore aims to help women and gender non-conforming music industry workers restart their careers after a career break. Through focus groups and interviews with music industry workers from Victoria, Australia, the project team developed the Encore Training Package and delivered a pilot trial of the training. The Package has been made freely available to the Australian music industry through its industry partners, helping women and gender non-conforming people to plan their career breaks with confidence and community support.

One of Shelley's principal research interests is Japan’s popular music world. She continues to work on a long-running project that examines identity, community and nationalism in the annual NHK Red and White Song Contest (Kōhaku Utagassen) – a live television program that can be loosely described as “Japan’s Eurovision Song Contest”. Shelley has conducted fieldwork at the rehearsals in Tokyo on numerous occasions since 2000, including 2013-14 and 2019-2020 as a two-time recipient of the Japan Foundation 'Japanese Studies Fellowship', and other competitive research grants. One of Shelley's representative publications about the contest can be found in the book Made in Japan: Studies in Japanese Popular Music (Routledge, Mitsui, 2015). Her Bloomsbury 33 1/3 Japan book, "Kōhaku Utagassen: The Red and White Song Contest", is currently under review.

Shelley is an experienced public speaker on Japanese popular music topics for English language media commentary. In addition to song contests, she examines holographic televised song performances as well as ‘posthumous duets’ (where a living singer is paired with a deceased singer generated by digital means). She has presented talks in Japan at Tokyo University of the Arts, Kyoto Seika University, Hosei University Research Centre for Intercultural Studies in Tokyo, and Kansai University in Osaka, among others. More locally, she has presented a seminars for The Japan Foundation, Sydney. Her research about Japanese popular music has been quoted in international media outlets and she was profiled on NHK Japanese TV in a special programme about the 60th edition of the Red and White Song Contest ("Kōhaku A to Z").