Research
As a scholar, I straddle boundaries: I am a scientist who studies traditionally humanistic topics, a psychologist who studies music theory, and a computational musicologist who studies cognition. I am passionate about rigorous scientific methodology and statistics, and about finding meaningful data to feed them. However, my scientific work is grounded in, informed by, and evaluated in light of, fundamentally humanistic music theory. Thus, I seek answers to music theoretic, musicological, and ethnomusicological questions using methods drawn from psychology, linguistics, and computer science.
Sciences and Humanities
I believe that scientific and humanistic research are complementary. Musical structures, experiences, and behaviors—ensconced as they are in the rich ecology of human culture—are unfathomably complex. Humanists thrive in this complexity—celebrating nuance, following their intuitions, and asking interesting questions which lead them ever deeper into the web, tracing individual strands until they are lost in the daunting tapestry. Scientists, on the other hand, mistrust complexity—"noise" in which a question can find a thousand plausible answers as easily as the eye finds constellations among the stars. How can we trust an idea, if we can't prove it wrong? Scientists step back from the forest—evading nuance, distrusting intuitions, and looking for simple explanations and concrete answers. However, the sheer complexity of music belies reductive precision and simplification. Unmusical operational definitions, inappropriate experimental controls, or bad reductive assumptions often confuse the results of otherwise good science. Thus, humanistic perspective is needed to make the scientific study of music fruitful—to make sure we don't throw out the signal with the noise, like the proverbial baby in its bath water. Having studied and collaborated with scholars in music theory, musicology, ethnomusicology, computer science, music information retrieval, and music cognition, I have come to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses, insights and blind-spots, of each field. I believe that all these perspectives—the humanistic and the scientific—are essential to music scholarship.Computation and Psychology
I work in two distinct methodological paradigms: music psychology and computational musicology. In the first paradigm, I conduct behavioral experiments with human participants. In the later, I curate large symbolic music datasets and use them to create and evaluate computational models of musical structures. Though these two paradigms might appear unrelated, I see them as complimentary: Music springs, ultimately, from the human mind, body, and soul. However, humans are fundamentally plastic, absorbing music from their environment. This is why I believe it is essential to study not only musical experience directly, through behavioral experimentation, but also the structure of music itself—each is a window into the other. I have presented and published research in both domains, and strive to do ever more to tie the two paradigms, and their respective scholarly communities, closer together.
