Lecturer III, Program in Computing for the Arts and Sciences
About
Brian Miller is a lecturer in the Program in Computing for the Arts and Sciences (PCAS) at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the intersection of music and computing, bringing together perspectives from music theory, media theory, and art history to understand how computational models produce and embody musical knowledge. He has written on the intellectual history of the concept of musical style since the 1950s, the role of jazz in attempts to build improvising computer systems, and the semiotics of musical algorithms, and current projects include a critical study of recent generative AI music tools and a history of early computer music improvisation at Bell Labs.
Academic publications:
"Rethinking Replication in Leonard Meyer’s Theory of Musical Style." In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies, 2025
“Language, Gesture, Style: Adorno’s Theory of Musical Reproduction between Musicology and Art History.” In Dialektik der Schrift: Zu Adornos Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion, 2022
“Digital Scores, Algorithmic Agents, Encoded Ontologies: On the objects of musical computation.” In Material Cultures of Music Notation: New Perspectives on Musical Inscription, 2022
“Leonard Meyer’s Theory of Musical Style, from Pragmatism to Information Theory.” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 2.4 (2021)
“‘All of the rules of jazz’: Stylistic Models and Algorithmic Creativity in Human-Computer Improvisation.” Music Theory Online 26.3 (September 2020)
