Father McKenzie Music

About Me

I am a musician, composer, and scientist, specializing in the statistical modeling of musical structure. I studied music psychology, computational musicology, and scientific methodology with David Huron. I have presented at numerous national and international conferences, both in the humanities (Society of Music Theory) and the sciences (Society for Music Perception and Cognition, International Conference on Music Information Retrieval). From 2016-2018, I worked on McGill University's Single Interface for Musical Score Search and Analysis project, developing tools for the analysis of digital scores. I am currently a lecturer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I teach classes in recording technology, rock/pop performance, and computational composition.

Education

I completed my PhD in Music Theory at Ohio State University, where I studied with David Huron. My doctoral thesis involved the creation, curation, and analysis of a corpus of popular rap transcriptions: the Musical Corpus of Flow—research later published in Empirical Musicology Review.
I completed a BA and a MA in Music Composition at the University of California Santa Cruz, where I studied with David Evan Jones, David Cope, and Larry Polansky.

For more detail, check out my curriculum vitae.

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.