Leah Kardos

Dr Leah Kardos | Kingston University London

My research examines studio practices, recording technologies, and popular music production, combining historical analysis, creative practice, and critical scholarship. Building on my work on David Bowie and Kate Bush, I investigate how these technologies shape musical creativity and cultural memory.

My current research recovers women's hidden labour in British recording studios from the 1960s to the 1990s, using feminist oral history methods to document their experiences. This work interrogates how gender has structured access to technical creative roles, and challenges the male-centric narratives that dominate studio heritage. Through the Visconti Studio at Kingston, I explore studio culture as both historical object and living practice, combining archival research, interviews, and contemporary observation to understand how analogue recording environments produce knowledge, preserve heritage, and shape inclusive futures for music technology education.

Alongside my historical and critical work, I maintain an active practice-led research programme in which composition, production, and recording function as modes of enquiry in their own right. This strand develops from my doctoral research in creative practice, and continues to investigate sampling and plunderphonic methods, the negotiation of chance and control in the studio, and the ways recorded sound holds memory and affect.

I work as a composer and producer, and undertake collaborative commissions in the contemporary art sector. Through my work with the Visconti Studio I extend this practice toward inclusive, community-centred music-making, treating the studio as both a site of artistic production and a space for examining how technologies, bodies, and creative decisions shape recorded sound.

Through the Visconti Studio, I bridge academic research with the creative industries and public audiences. I have secured strategic partnerships generating income and equipment donations from music technology companies, and maintain relationships with major London recording studios, some of which provide professional development opportunities for students. I founded the Kingston University Stylophone Orchestra, creating inclusive community music-making with commercial outputs (two released albums). As a regular contributor to The Wire magazine, I translate specialist music research for professional and public audiences.

The Visconti Studio hosts industry masterclasses, public exhibitions, commercial sessions, and knowledge exchange events. My knowledge exchange activities generate financial value, enhance student employability, preserve studio heritage, and position Kingston within the professional networks that shape music technology discourse and practice. As a member of the Design, Arts and Creative Practice Knowledge Exchange and Research Institute (DACP KERI), I am interested in supporting cross-disciplinary projects that involve recorded media and performance.