Gary E. McPherson studied music education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, before completing a master of music education at Indiana University, a doctorate of philosophy at the University of Sydney and a licentiate and fellowship in trumpet performance through Trinity College, London. Before arriving in Melbourne to take up his current position as Ormond Professor and Director of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, he worked at the University of New South Wales (where the study was first funded), and then the Hong Kong Institute of Education and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he held the Marilyn Pflederer Zimmerman endowed chair in music education. He has served as National President of the Australian Society for Music Education and President of the International Society for Music Education and has published extensively in various books and refereed journals.
Jane W. Davidson studied musicology, classical singing, contemporary dance, education, and psychology in UK and Canada, completing several postgraduate courses including two masters degrees and a PhD. She worked for thirteen years at the University of Sheffield, before taking up the inaugural Callaway/Tunley Chair of Music at the University of Western Australia in 2006. Her research includes projects on reflective performance practice, vocal production, musical expression and emotion, expressive body movement in performance, musical skills acquisition and therapeutic uses of music. She has published widely, is the former editor of Psychology of Music (1997-2001), was vice-president of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (2003-2006), and is the current president of the Musicological Society of Australia. She is Deputy Director of the new Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions.
Robert Faulkner is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music in London and holds a licentiate in singing teaching from the same institution. He went on to postgraduate music education studies at Reading University and later completed an MA in music psychology and a PhD from the University of Sheffield. He lived in Iceland for over twenty years, where he worked at all levels of education from early childhood to tertiary, played a leading role in national curriculum development and was inaugural deputy chair of the Iceland Music Examinations Board. He was the postdoctoral research associate on the ARC DP0770257 (2007-2010), the topic of the current book, and is now Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the School of Music at the University of Western Australia.