Father McKenzie Music

humdrumR

I am lead developer of humdrumR, a project to port the humdrum toolkit into the R programming language. Our aim is to overcome humdrum's cross-platform issues (and steep learning curve) while making all the power of R's data manipulation, statistics, and plotting packages applicable to musical data encoded in the humdrum syntax. Our source code is available on github—though the package isn't really ready for release yet!

humdrumR is not just aimed at existing coders, but at scholars with little or no coding experience. The package exploits contemporary R's slick combination of functional, pipe-based, and "vectorized" coding to afford powerful, flexible analytical possibilities, with minimal yet expressive syntax. For example, we completely avoid explicit for loops and mutable state. The package is generalized to work on any data encoded in the humdrum-syntax, which is extremely general. We hope the humdrumR might serve as a nice introduction to coding for music scholars.

Rap Science

Harmonic Analysis

Highlife

Research

As a researcher, I combine humanistic and scientific methodologies in the study of music. Specifically, I engage in computational modeling of symbolic music data and behavioral experimentation with human participants. The questions and ideas I explore are all grounded in, informed by, and evaluated in light of, fundamentally humanistic music theory.

Music

I am an active musician and composer. As a guitarist, bassist, and drummer/percussionist, I play a variety of musics, mostly American vernacular music (rock, pop, hip-hop) and world music—I am also a trained classical guitarist. As a composer, I synthesize common-practice, popular, and world musics, especially focusing on sophisticated rhythm and tempo relationships, inspired by Indonesian Gamelan music.

Pedagogy

I've had the pleasure of music at four different universities, and with K-12 kids in afterschool classes and private lessons. I've taught entire music theory curricula, classes in music technology and music cognition,, and rock/pop music performance. I also love to teach scientific research methodologies, especially statistics, and programming.