My primary research interest focuses on the investigation of musical features which allow listeners to define and differentiate styles, specifically addressing the intersection of music cognition and popular music.

In contemporary music-theoretical discourse there is no consensus answer to the question of whether or not “the rules” of popular music are different from those of the Common Practice.

Our work thus far has shown that stylistic context has a significant impact on harmonic expectation, but what exactly are “the rules” of rock music, and how do they differ from those purported to govern common-practice music? This question led me and my collaborators to pursue a study of rock’s tonal hierarchy, and to investigate whether or not this hierarchy differed from the one commonly believed to govern Western classical music. Our approach to this was to emulate Carol Krumhansl’s classic probe tone studies, which revealed that when participants provided a goodness-of-fit rating for all twelve chromatic pitches in a tonal context, those ratings reflected the common-practice tonal hierarchy. Once again, our findings showed that the tonal hierarchies, when separated by style, were significantly different from one another. These findings supported our results from the harmony studies, broadening our conclusions beyond the comparison of two-chord successions to include the entire chromatic scale.

Another branch of our syntax project addresses the perception of rhythm, meter, and tempo in the context of rock music, and how that perception deviates from the axioms of common-practice music theory. Our work has shown that the placement of the backbeat, which is ubiquitous in rock music and virtually absent in common-practice repertoire, had a significant impact on listeners’ interpretations of measure boundaries and perceptions of tempo. The results suggest that our models of metric hierarchy do not reflect one of the most prominent stylistic traits of rock music, and that this trait is fundamental to listeners’ perceptions of time unfolding during a listening experience.

My research contributes to the growing body of empirical work on popular music in the discipline. Given the diversity of repertoire from which so many young musicians today draw their experience, my research raises important questions about how we go about teaching musical context to this generation of students. This work excites me both as a scholar and a pedagogue, and I believe it will be a fruitful line of research well into the future. 

Music Theory Pedagogy

My interest in and experimentation with new pedagogical approaches to music theory has also had a great impact on my research agenda. I have published in the area of critical music theory pedagogy, and am a co-founder of Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy. I am a co-author of Open Music Theory, an open educational resource that serves as a fully functional, online music theory textbook and workbook that is available for free.

Pedagogy research has been extremely rewarding for me as both a scholar and a teacher, and I plan to continue to work in this area in the future.