David Sears

I am an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Texas Tech University, where I am 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). Prior to joining TTU, I 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).

My 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. I also have ancillary interests in topics related to music and emotion, popular music analysis, and music on the radio, and I regularly attend 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, Psychology of Music, Auditory Perception and Cognition, the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, the Journal of Mathematics and Music, the Journal of New Music Research, the International Journal of Psychophysiology, and Eighteenth-Century Music (see my Google Scholar Profile for a complete listing of my publications). Much of the behavioral and computational data associated with my 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, I teach 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. I also regularly teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the music theory area (e.g., Music and the Mind, Elementary Music Theory I-II, Intermediate Music Theory I-II).

     

Mapping the location of live radio streams for the Music Listening Across the Globe project.