Publications

My writings deal with the intersection of mathematics with a variety of topics in music theory and analysis, such as rhythm, harmony, musical structure, and form. The lists below link to preprint pdfs available through OpenBU or this website, or journal websites in the case of open access publications.




Recent: 

I presented “Coherence of Harmonic and Rhythmic Qualities” (powerpoint) at the Mathematical Encounters in Singapore conference on 2/19/2024.

I did a Zoom colloquium talk for the Society for Music Analysis on Dec. 6, 2023, 18:30 GMT/1:30pm EST entitled “Periodicity and Continuity in Pitch and Time.” Here is the powerpoint (warning: large file!) and a (smaller) pdf.

I presented “Windows into Musical Time” at the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Musical Time conference (Música Analitica, 2nd International Conference),  showing how the paradigm of windowed analysis can lead to a way of understanding the concept of “vertical time.”

My recent essay, “Tonality and Racism” will be published soon by the Journal of Music Theory along with 10 responses to the essay by leading thinkers in music theory.

I gave a keynote presentation for the Rhythm in Music Since 1900Sept. 22–24, 2023, on Sat Sept. 23, 11:00–12:15. The title of my talk was “Rhythmic Regularity beyond Meter and Isochrony.” Here is my powerpoint (which is large due to embedded video and audio) and for an easier download, a pdf version.

At the Analytical Approaches to World Music Special Topics Symposium (June 1–8, 2023), I presented on the panel discussion, “Stephen Blum’s Music Theory in Ethnomusicology: A Book Dialogue,” chaired by Michael Tenzer. My comments are here: Music theory nationalized or internationalized: reflections on global music theory occasioned by Stephen Blum’s Music Theory in Ethnomusicology. 

A recent issue of the Journal of Mathematics and Music (Vol. 16, no. 3, Fall 2022) is a tribute to Jack Douthett, which I edited.

In 2022, I edited a special issue of the Journal of Mathematics and Music (16/2) on the Mathematics of Rhythm in honor of Godfried Toussiant, with Chris White and Leigh Van Handel, which can be found here.

I recently published an article that proposes a data-driven approach to identifying harmonies in music with Jaesong Lee and Eugene Pinsky, “A Clustering-Based Approach to Automatic Harmonic Analysis: An Exploratory Study of Harmony and Form in Mozart’s Piano Sonatas” Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval 5/1.

At the meeting of the American Brahms Society, Brahms 2022: New Paths, New Persepctives in New Orleans, Nov. 9–10, I presented on a themed session organized by Richard Cohn, entitled Brahms’s Hybrid Metric Dissonances, 1:30–3:00 on Weds. 11/9. My paper, “Multivalent Displaced Hemiolas in Brahms’s Late Songs” analyzes three songs from Op. 94 and Op. 106 and introduces a visualization of metrical displacement and hemiola I call the “metric cyclone.”

At the Joint Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory, and Society for Ethnomusicology, I presented a poster on the SMT poster session from 8–10 AM on Friday Nov. 11. My poster, “Interacting Periodicities in the Music of Ligeti and The Bad Plus” shows how rhythmic spectra can reveal implicit periodicities in “funky” rhythms that can interact, similar in certain ways to polyrhythms, but with a different effect. I draw examples from the later music of modernist composer György Ligeti and the members of the boundary-pushing jazz trio The Bad Plus (Reid Anderson and Dave King) form the early 2000s.

Also at this meeting, I gave a talk for the Mathematics of Music Interest Group of the SMT on Friday, Nov. 11, 12:30–2:00 PM on the mathematical portions of my 2018 book, Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form I focused on Chs. 4, 13, and 14, which introduce properties of structural networks, some graph theory for structural networks, and the idea of the associahedron as a geometry of structural networks.