Mahdis Bayat

Overview

Mahdis Bayat is a PhD candidate in Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University. Her dissertation explores audience engagement with Persian-language satellite television and Persian popular music in the 2000s, focusing on how broadcasts from Los Angeles became part of everyday life in Iran. Mahdis Bayat studied Fine Arts for her bachelor's degree at Al-Zahra University of Tehran; the field which encompasses a wide variety of arts. However, since she had a passion for music, she decided to integrate music and crafts into her thesis project. She investigated different types of wood used in musical instruments. Her method consisted of visiting various musical instrument studios and interviewing several master luthiers. After graduation, she joined the Österreichisches Kulturforum (cultural part of the Austrian Embassy in Tehran) chorus.

For the graduate level, Mahdis Bayat pursued an MA in ethnomusicology at Tehran University of Art, in pursuit of her scholarly research goals and affinity to ethnographic fieldwork. At the Tehran University of Art, she worked on popular music in Iran within cinema and café performances. In her thesis, she uncovers the connection between café music and Iranian cinema, presenting the social contexts of musical life and music production in the 1950s and 1960s in Tehran. Also, she investigated the issue of Iran's modernization in the 50s and 60s, explaining how cafés, as an element of this modernization, became a mediator between music and Iranian cinema. A part of this research was published in Mahoor Music Quarterly in 2022. While completing her master's degree, she worked as an archival assistant in the Music Museum, where she learned about digitizing records and providing databases based on discography methods.