J.T. & Margaret Talkington
College of Visual & Performing Arts
Performing Arts Research Lab
Who We Are
The Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL) uses a combination of interdisciplinary experimental and computational methods to address fundamental questions about the composition, performance, and reception of music, theatre and dance, and the visual arts.
We focus primarily on learning and memory, the formation of expectations, and emotion and empirical aesthetics. The lab employs methods from psychophysics, cognitive psychology, psychophysiology, corpus linguistics, information retrieval, systematic musicology, and music theory and analysis.
The Performing Arts Research Laboratory is housed in the School of Music at the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual & Performing Arts at Texas Tech University.
Research Areas Spotlight
Lab Members
Dr. David R. W. Sears
Director
Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts
Dr. Peter A. Martens
Director
Associate Professor of Music Theory
Elizabeth Acosta
PhD Student
Fine Arts – Interdisciplinary Arts
Lab Manager
Brad Cawyer
DMA Student
Conducting
Devin Guerrero
PhD Student
Fine Arts – Music Theory
Justin Glosson
PhD Candidate
Fine Arts – Musicology
Kathryn Kelley
PhD Candidate
Fine Arts – Visual Art
Alissa Stolt
MM Student
Fine Arts – Music Theory
Alumni
Lucas Hess
BA/MA
Psychology
Hannah Percival
PhD
Fine Arts – Music Theory
Jonathan Verbeten
PhD
Fine Arts – Musicology
Sylvia Weintraub
PhD
Fine Arts – Visual Art
PeARL News
Recent Graduates
Hannah Percival (“Can You Hear the Connection? A Study on Musical-Social Bonding”) and Sylvia Weintraub (“Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Online: Why Making Matters on Pinterest”) successfully defended their dissertations! Congratulations!
National/International Conference Presentations in 2021
Members of the PeARL have presented papers at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Future Directions in Music Cognition, the International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021), and the International Society of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). Congrats to Justin Glosson, Hannah Percival, Jonathan Verbeten, Sylvia Weintraub, and David Sears!
Awards & Prizes in 2021
Brad Cawyer won 1st place in the Visual and Performing Arts Category for a paper (“Syntactic Processing of Tonal Harmony: Evidence from Aphasia”) presented at the 11th Annual Arts and Humanities Conference at TTU (2021)!
recent publications
Sears, Verbeten, & Percival. (2021). Intonation discrimination for tonal chord sequences in a priming paradigm: Effects of target predictability and musical expertise. Auditory Perception & Cognition.
Weintraub & Sears (2021). Why making matters online: The Pinterest-DIY data set. Proceedings of the Association of Internet Researchers.
Sears & Forrest. (2021). Triadic patterns across classical and popular music corpora: Stylistic conventions, or characteristic idioms?” Journal of Mathematics and Music.
Abri, Gutierrez, Datta, Sears, Namin, & Jones. (2021). A comparative analysis of modeling perceived and induced emotions in sonification. Electronics.
Research Areas
popular music & the Radio
This research area examines Anglophone popular music traditions associated with the latter half of the twentieth century (e.g., 50s doo-wop, 70s rock) using both close- and distant-reading (i.e., corpus-driven) methodologies. Current projects explore (1) the rise of synthesizer timbres in 80s pop; and (2) the characteristic scales and chord progressions encountered in popular music corpora like the Billboard “Hot” 100 and the Rolling-Stone data set.
creativity & Emotion
This research area explores how methods for expressive communication (e.g., writing, participation in online communities) can affect creative behaviors like sculpting or painting. Current projects examine (1) the rise of DIY communities on social-networking systems like Pinterest; and (2) whether expressive writing serves as an implicit intervention strategy by mitigating the effects of stress and reinforcing creative performance.
film music & video games
This research area investigates the multi-modal effects of movies and video games on memory, attention, and emotion using both behavioral and computational methods. Current projects examine (1) whether music facilitates the visual recognition of emotions for individuals with autism spectrum disorder; (2) the function of sound during “jump scares” in horror films; and (3) the interaction between virtual audiences and musical performer(s) in online video games.
Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL)
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Address
Holden Hall - Rm 103, 1011 Boston Ave., Lubbock, TX 79409 -
Phone
806.742.0700 -
Email
cvpa.pearl@ttu.edu