Under the supervision of Professor John Sloboda a three-year international comparative research project has been developed to investigating the practitioners who work with diverse groups in society to achieve social as well as artistic results. The research is focusing on how they came into such work, what training they received for it, their motivations for doing the work, and their beliefs about its effectiveness, how they assess that, and how that impacts on the development of their practice.  It is set up under the direction of the Guildhall School of Music (London), in a close collaboration with researchers in Belgium (University College Ghent), Finland (Sibelius Academy, Helsinki) and Colombia (Fundación Universitaria Juan N Corpas, Bogota). The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has granted an important fund to this international research project. The comparative research started in 2020 and its conclusions will be communicated during the 7th SIMM-posium of 12-14 December 2022 at the Guildhall School in London. Thanks to a subsidy from the Flemish Ministry of Culture and sponsoring from the Belgian Fondation Futur 21, SIMM could co-fund the Belgian part of this research which is being developed under the supervision of An De Bisschop of the University College of Ghent (HoGent).

More information on this research can be found here on the website of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.