I am an Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan, where I direct the Music Cognition & Computation Lab (MCCL). Prior to joining the University of Michigan, I completed a PhD in music theory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Institute of Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria.
I specialize in the perception and cognition of musical traditions and participant populations both within and beyond the West using the many methods of inference associated with the cognitive sciences. To that end, I regularly conduct large-scale music-listening experiments and then borrow and adapt methods from the data sciences to simulate the obtained findings. I also sometimes create mobile apps and other online user interfaces to collect data from listeners in real-time.
Please describe one or two of your most interesting projects.
For my current project, Music Informatics for Radio Across the GlobE (MIRAGE), I developed an open-access database and accompanying online dashboard of music metadata that allow researchers to access, interact with, and export information about the music streaming on internet radio. I am now also conducting a series of online behavioral experiments to determine whether, and to what degree, listeners associate the music sampled from MIRAGE with specific geographic locations across the globe.
How did you end up where you are today? (Your research journey)
I started my academic and professional life as a composer and performer, but soon became more interested in analyzing music (music theory), conducting behavioral experiments (experimental psychology) and learning to code in languages like matlab, R, and python (data science). I eventually found a career in music science that enables me to pursue these interests in equal measure. My background is thus interdisciplinary, having completed degrees in music theory while working in research labs specializing in music perception and cognition (BAs, PhD) and music informatics (Postdoc).
What is the most significant scientific contribution you would like to make?
I would like the MIRAGE online dashboard and metacorpus to contain millions of songs sampled from internet radio stations across the globe over several decades so that researchers across the music sciences and humanities can explore the diversity of traditions encountered on internet radio.
I also plan to publish a book-length study that integrates the insights from MIRAGE with online behavioral and psychophysiological music-listening experiments conducted in the Music Cognition and Computation Lab (MCCL) at the University of Michigan.
What makes you excited about your data science and AI research?
I’m consistently overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of musical traditions that I find on internet radio, much of which has yet to be explored in the academic/scientific community. What might we learn about the human capacity to make, perform, and listen to music if we canapply the most cutting-edge tools on a global scale?
What are 1-3 interesting facts about yourself?
- WikiData is my favorite open-access online library. (Learn to query in sparql!)
- I prefer to work collaboratively.