Office Number: School of Music, Rm 239

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David Sears is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Texas Tech University, where he is also Affiliated Faculty in Music Theory, Co-Director of the Performing Arts Research Laboratory (PeARL), and Coordinator of the Bachelor of Arts program in Interdisciplinary Arts Studies (BA-IAS; soon to be renamed “Arts Media and Technology”). Prior to joining TTU, he completed a PhD in music theory in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal (2016), and a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Institute of Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler University in Linz (2017).

Dr. Sears' current research examines the structural parallels between music and language using both behavioral and computational methods, with a particular emphasis on the many topics associated with pitch structure, including scale theory, tonality, harmony, cadence, and musical form. He also has ancillary interests in topics related to music on the radio, music and emotion, and popular music analysis, and he regularly attends conferences related to music perception and cognition (ICMPC, SMPC, ESCOM), music informatics (ISMIR, CMMR, MML), and music theory and analysis (SMT, EuroMAC). Recent publications have appeared in venues like Music Perception, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Psychology of Music, Auditory Perception and Cognition, the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, the Journal of Mathematics and Music, the International Journal of Psychophysiology, and Eighteenth-Century Music (see his Google Scholar Profile for a complete listing of his publications). Much of the behavioral and computational data associated with his research (stimuli, data sets, analysis scripts, software applications, etc.) is also available for download on the open science framework and/or Github.

As a pedagogue, Dr. Sears teaches graduate seminars for the Fine Arts Doctoral Program (FADP), which serves students in the Schools of Music, Theatre & Dance, and Art. Examples of recent offerings include The Digital Humanities in the Arts, Language, Evolution, & the Arts, and Psychology Across the Arts. He also regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the music theory area (e.g., Music Cognition, Elementary Music Theory I-II, Intermediate Music Theory I-II).