About
Sam Mukherji‘s work explores connections between language and music, especially as related computational systems of the mind. Within this framework, the main focus of his research has been on the syntactic aspects of these systems, and therefore how syntactic structures are created by the mind—as described, in particular, by the Minimalist Program in contemporary generative linguistics. He has further explored connections between Minimalist linguistics and related, generative, approaches within music theory (such as found in Schenkerian music theory), and he has also written extensively about what such “musicolinguistic” connections imply for the wider study of human cognition, evolution, and creativity.
He has studied the above topics in the context of several musical idioms, especially in the classical traditions of Western and Indian music (in both of which he trained for several years, as a violinist), and also in classic and contemporary rock and metal (in which he remains fairly active as a performer too, mainly as a guitarist). He is the series editor of the Routledge book series New Directions in World Music Analysis, whose first volume, Trends in World Music Analysis (co-edited with Lawrence Shuster and Noé Dinnerstein), was published in 2022, and whose second volume Mathematical Approaches to World Music Analysis (co-edited with Nathan Lam and Robert Peck) is in press. He also completed the music theorist and ethnomusicologist Harold Powers's unfinished monograph, Rītigaula: A Study of Improvisation and Discourse in Indian Music, which was published in 2021 as part of Routledge's Raga book series. Further writings of his appear in journals such as Perspectives of New Music and Analytical Approaches to World Music, and other edited collections, and he has presented his work at several regional and national conferences, such as those of the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the International Congress on Musical Signification, the American Brahms Society, etc.
Mukherji completed his doctoral work with a dissertation titled “Generative Musical Grammar: A Minimalist Approach” at Princeton University, which was supported by a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter honorific fellowship from Princeton, and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He completed his undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Delhi, and then received a second bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford (in psychology, philosophy, and physiology), as a Rhodes Scholar. His work has also been supported by various grants from the University of Michigan, including from the Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society (MIDAS), and most recently an MCubed 3.0 grant for the "Generative Linguistics and Music (GLAM)" project, in collaboration with the late Michigan linguist Samuel D. Epstein, and the psychologist Jun Zhang.
