Welcome!

I am an assistant professor in music theory at the University of Connecticut and affiliate faculty at The CT Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences (IBACS). Prior to this appointment, I taught at the University of Dayton. My research focuses on the analysis and cognition of musical expectation, mainly geared toward understanding how we learn and categorize musical style.

I received my PhD in music theory from Yale University. My dissertation investigated listeners’ harmonic expectations of popular music through a computational analysis of information entropy in the McGill Billboard Corpus.

I also received a masters degree in psychology from the University at Buffalo, a masters degree in music theory from Bowling Green State University, and a bachelor of music composition from the University of Florida. At Buffalo, I worked with Dr. Peter Pfordresher in the Auditory Perception and Action Lab. My psychology MA thesis researched metrical influences on the perception of melodic motives. An article documenting the results may be found in Vol. 31 of Music Perception. My music master’s thesis focused on atonal segmentation.

Other research interests include analysis and cognition of musical form, schemata, and segmentation; pedagogical applications of cognitive/psychological research; as well as the analysis and cognition of avant-garde, popular, and non-Western musics (including Javanese gamelan and Latin American traditions).

I am also a composer and performer (trombone, Javanese gamelan, carillon). Please feel free to browse my site for information about my other musical work.