Current projects

Psychology of Musical Repetition

Huron (2006) observes that music is a uniquely repetitive stimulus. While music theory has examined repetition in the context of form, there has been surprisingly little examination from either music or psychology of the dynamic experience of repeating elements. What is repetition's function in the learning, syntax, and enjoyment of music? A set of theoretical, behavioral, and neuroimaging studies, as well as an in-progress book manuscript investigate these questions. 

Conceptual Listening

How can knowing things about a piece affect the way it's processed and experienced? For example, what's the difference between listening to an unfamiliar piece for which you've read the program notes and one for which you haven't? How does conceptualization restructure perception? What is the relationship between verbal accounts of music and auditory experience? A set of empirical and theoretical studies address these questions.

Expectation, Musical Topics, and Affective Experience

This project, for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, examines the way that musical topics work to differentiate responses to musical surprises. The aim is to understand the way expectation might play a role in affective experience that extends beyond notions of tension and relaxation.

Multimodal Responses to Basic Tonal Structures

This project, a collaboration with Zohar Eitan at Tel Aviv University, uses the probe tone method to investigate multidimensional percepts of basic tonal structures, extending beyond experiences of tension and relaxation to address experiences of spatial location (near/far, high/low), pleasure, interest, size (large/small), texture (rough/smooth, light/dark), and others, with an eye toward understanding the ways these dimensions might interrelate.

For information about previous work, please visit publications.