Associate Professor of Music Theory; Psychology Faculty Associate
About
David Sears is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Music Cognition & Computation Lab (MCCL) and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Music Perception: an interdisciplinary journal. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, he completed a PhD in music theory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Institute of Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria.
Dr. Sears specializes in the perception and cognition of musical traditions and participant populations both within and beyond the West using the many methods of inference associated with the cognitive sciences. To date, his published research explores topics related to music on the global radio, music-language correspondences, music and emotion, and cross-cultural studies, and he also regularly attends conferences related to music perception and cognition (ICMPC, SMPC, ESCOM), music informatics (ISMIR, CMMR, MML), and music theory and analysis (SMT, EuroMAC). Recent publications have appeared in venues like Music Perception, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Psychology of Music, Auditory Perception and Cognition, the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, the Journal of Mathematics and Music, the International Journal of Psychophysiology, and Eighteenth-Century Music (see his Google Scholar Profile for a complete listing of his publications). Much of the behavioral and computational data associated with his research (stimuli, data sets, analysis scripts, software applications, etc.) is also available for download on the open science framework and/or Github. Finally, his work has received financial support from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the CH Foundation.
Dr. Sears is particularly passionate about open-access initiatives in music research, conducting large-scale computational and behavioral experiments, and mentoring students with a passion for music research. Students interested in joining the MCCL can contact Dr. Sears at drwsears@umich.edu.
