I’m a composer, music theorist, and cognitive scientist. At this site you can listen to my compositions, learn about my research, and download my papers.

As a composer, I’ve written mainly piano music, chamber music, and songs. Some upcoming performances of my works in spring/summer 2024: Emily Hart will play my Suite for Oboe and Piano in the Summer@Eastman concert series; Elizabeth Crecca and Daniel Kuehler will play my Sonata for Piano Duet in a recital at Bucknell University; Peter Kurau and Chiao-wen Cheng will play my horn sonata at the International Horn Symposium; and two new pieces, a string quartet and a suite for two pianos, will be played at a concert of works by me and Octavio Vazquez at Nazareth College.

As a researcher, I’m interested in the way people perceive, process, and mentally represent music, and the possibility of learning about this through computational modeling. I’m also interested in corpus analysis (statistical analysis of music) and what it can tell us about musical styles and broader issues of music cognition. I’ve worked a lot on popular music, emotion in music, and issues of rhythm and meter. I have a strong secondary interest in language research: parsing, sentence production / comprehension, and corpus research.

An article in City Newspaper about my music / A radio interview on WXXI