Faculty | Graduate Students | Photos

Faculty

Richard Ashley
Associate Professor
• r-ashley@northwestern.edu
DMusA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Chair, Department of Music Studies. Director, Music Cognition Lab. Research and publications in music cognition focusing on expressive performance, musical communication, and long-term memory for music. President, Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Member, editorial board, Music Perception. Recipient of two Fulbright grants for research in the Netherlands and grants from National Endowment for the Humanities and U.S. Department of Education. Recipient, School of Music Exemplar in Teaching Award. Also teaches in the cognitive science program.

 

Robert Gjerdingen
Professor
• r-gjerdingen@northwestern.edu
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Coordinator, music theory & cognition program. Author of numerous books, articles, and reviews in the fields of music theory, music perception, and 18th-century musical style. Former editor, Music Perception. Has served on the executive board of the Society for Music Theory and the editorial board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Was Vice President for Music Taxonomy at MoodLogic, Inc., an on-line music company in Silicon Valley, at the peak of the Internet revolution. For more information, visit his web site.

 

Bryan Pardo
Assistant Professor
• pardo@northwestern.edu
PhD, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor
Assistant professor in Department of Computer Science with a courtesy appointment in School of Music.

Visit his web site.

 

Susan Piagentini
Senior Lecturer
• s-piagentini@northwestern.edu
PhD, Northwestern University
2009 Charles Deering McCormick University Distinguished Lecturer
Coordinator, first-year theory and aural skills curriculum. Continued research in pedagogy with an emphasis on technology. Workshops and papers given at national and regional conferences, including the Society for Music Theory, Association for Technology in Music Instruction, Technological Directions in Music Learning, Indiana University at IUPUI Music Technology Conference and the College Music Society. Recipient, University Research Grants Committee and Searle Center for Teaching Excellence grants to develop web-based materials to supplement the undergraduate core curriculum.

 

Janet Pierrehumbert
Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professor of Linguistics
• jbp@northwestern.edu
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
She is a laboratory phonologist whose research combines computational and experimental methods. Her model of English intonation, developed in 1978-1988 at MIT and AT&T Bell Labs, laid foundations for the ToBI transcription standard and has been applied in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and speech technology. Since joining the faculty in 1989, she has worked on probabilistic models of phonetic variation, phonological grammars, and morphophonology. Her current research uses multi-agent modeling to explore the formation of categories and phonological grammars in individuals and populations. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Northwestern, she serves as Director of Graduate Studies for Linguistics and as Director of the Language and Music Systems Group of NICO (the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems).

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Graduate Students

Ben Anderson
PhD Student
• ben-anderson@northwestern.edu
Trained as a classical pianist, Ben studied music theory at the Eastman School of Music. He is interested in the perception of large-scale musical forms and music theory pedagogy. Previously, Ben taught music to gifted and talented, deaf, and multiply impaired students at T.H. Rogers School in Houston, Texas.  
 
 

 

Karen Chan
PhD Student
• KarenChan2013@u.northwestern.edu
Karen double-majored in Music and Neuroscience at Wellesley College, where she first became interested in music cognition. In 2008, she completed dual master's degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Piano Performance and Musicology. Her academic interests currently revolve around questions of musical experience, neurogenesis, and cortical plasticity.  
 

 

Ives Chor
PhD Student
• iveschor@u.northwestern.edu
BS Symbolic Systems, Stanford University
BMus Jazz Bass, Cornish College of the Arts
Current research in perception and production of groove in popular music of the African Diaspora. Previous professional experience as a bassist in Seattle and as a software designer at Microsoft Corporation.

Recent publications and presentations

 

Caroline Davis
PhD Student
• c-davis1@northwestern.edu
BS: Experimental Psychology, University of Texas at Arlington
BA: Jazz Studies, University of Texas at Arlington
Caroline is interested in the study of communication and interaction in jazz. Specifically, she wishes to examine the ways in which jazz musicians communicate using music, such as repetition and call-and-response, and how this relates to everyday conversation (thus, using methods of conversation analysis). Recent interests also include how jazz musicians communicate on a social level, and how they convey value systems, goals, and motivations to other musicians in the jazz community. She intends to understand these interests through interviewing, videotape analysis, and behavioral response data. In the musical world, Caroline is a free-lance saxophonist. She is also a member of several performing groups around the Chicago area.

Listen to Caroline's Music: www.myspace.com/carolinedavisjazz

Publications and Conference presentations

 

Ben Duane
PhD Student
• bfduane@northwestern.edu
MA Music theory, University of Minnesota
BMus Tuba performance, Augsburg College
Research interests include: the perception of harmony, counterpoint, and texture; the role of auditory stream segregation in music listening; and computational models of music cognition. Visit his web site.
 
Conference presentations

 

Matthew Gilmore
PhD Student
• m-gilmore@northwestern.edu
Matt studied Music Theory and Political Science at the University of Kansas. His current research focus considers Pop Musicology under the auspices of grounded cognition and phenomenology. Other interests include narratology, music and aesthetic response, attention, and history of music theory. When not at school Matt enjoys visiting his family in Minnesota where he finds satisfaction in fly-fishing, bicycling, and baseball.  
 

 

Kati Hamlin
MM Student
• KatiHamlin2010@u.northwestern.edu
Kati Hamlin holds a degree in piano performance from the University of Minnesota in Morris. Her interests include piano and theory pedagogy as well as the compositions of Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninoff.
 
 
 

 

Ji Chul Kim
PhD Student
• jc-kim@northwestern.edu
Studied physics and music theory at Seoul National University. Primary research interest in tonality perception, especially how temporal structure of musical elements relates to the perceived sense of tonal center. Also interested in computational modeling, corpus analysis and functional imaging of musical processes.
 
 

 

Jung Nyo Kim
PhD Student
• jung-kim@northwestern.edu
Trained as a classical pianist, studied music theory at Seoul Natioanl University. Her research interest is in the perception of implied harmony, focusing on how each note of a tonal melody is interpreted and integrated in terms of harmony. She is also interested in brain indices of harmonic integration in tonal melody perception.

Conference presentations  
 

 

Kyung Myun Lee
PhD Student
• k-lee5@northwestern.edu
MMus Music theory, Seoul National University
BA Psychology, Seoul National University
BMus Music theory, Seoul National University
Kyung Myun has worked on musical memory and on individual differences of absolute pitch possessors in pitch perception. Her current research interest is in how listeners' attention and working memory capacity relates to their comprehension of music. She is also interested in investigating the biological foundation of music with neurophysiological methods.

Conference presentations

 

Dana Strait
PhD Student
• d-strait@northwestern.edu
Trained as a classical pianist and oboist, Dana received her B.A. in music from Whitworth University. She has worked as an autism therapist and assisted in trauma therapy in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Her academic interests involve the neurophysiology of music cognition. Current projects relate to brainstem plasticity in musicians, emotion and autism.

Recent publications and presentations

 

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Photos

The Musical Ear conference, Bloomington, 2009

(From left) Kati Hamlin, Ben Duane, Ben Anderson, Sue Piagentini, Alex Temple, Robert Reinhart and Kenn Kumpf. At "The Musical Ear" conference at Indiana Univerity, Bloomington, September 2009.

 

 

SMPC 2009, Indianapolis

(From left) Ji Chul Kim, Jung Nyo Kim, Alexandra Parbery-Clark, Dana Strait and Karen Chan. After SMPC 2009 at IUPUI, Indianapolis, August 2009.

 

 

ICMPC 2008, Sapporo

(From left) Ben Anderson, Kyung Myun Lee, Caroline Davis, James Davis and Ric Ashley. At the group dinner in Sapporo, August 2008.

 

 

Holiday party 2007

(From left) Ben Duane, David Mainer, Ives Chor, and Ben Anderson. At the holiday gathering at Professor Gjerdingen's house, December 2007.

 

 

SMPC 2007, Montreal

(From left) Alexandra Parbery-Clark, Dana Strait, Caroline Davis, Jaime Madell, Jung Nyo Kim, Ji Chul Kim, Ives Chor, Ric Ashley, and Kyung Myun Lee. After Ives' presentation at SMPC 2007, Montreal.

 

 

ICMPC 2006, Bologna

(From left) Allison Ashley, Caroline Davis, Ji Chul Kim, James Davis, Ric Ashley, Jung Nyo Kim, Kyung Myun Lee, Ives Chor and Elizabeth Lhost. At an "Italian" restaurant in Bologna on the Friday night during ICMPC 2006.

 

 

Grad students 2005

(From left) Jung Nyo, Caroline, Ji Chul, Ives, and Kyung Myun. After the colloquium on Oct 5, 2005.

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Last updated: Nov 3, 2009