Projects

Ongoing & Upcoming

Timbre Semantics

Our research on timbre semantics studies the range of phenomenological experiences that musical timbres can evoke. We study how timbre can carry and generate meaning and how people communicate about timbral experiences and meanings. Much of this work concerns the kind of language we use in describing timbre, though we also consider non-linguistic means, such as crossmodal correspondences (e.g., sound and color) for communicating experiences of timbre. This area of research also investigates applications of our results to music analysis and pedagogy.

Popular Music & Embodied Cognition

How does the body signal understanding in popular music? This area focuses on performer and listener responses to popular music's features. Studies include motion-capture analysis of physical gestures during live performance, listener interpretation of backbeats, and exploring how factors such as timbre cues and musical background helps us make sense of ambiguous musical features such as chord loops.

Diversity, Equity , & Inclusion in Music Research

Popular music is not immune from discriminatory social forces, be it how Billboard leveraged race to form genre categories or how women have only recently risen to the same level of commercial success as men in pop styles. This area focuses on setting a methodological precedent for foregrounding marginalized voices in music analysis, broadly defined. Related projects include the ongoing development of a demographic database of popular music artists, conducting studies with general listeners and self-taught musicians, and exploring the performance practices of BIPOC, female, and non-binary artists through case studies.

Instrument-Specific Absolute Pitch (ISAP)

While absolute pitch (AP)—the ability to name musical pitches globally and without reference—is rare in expert musicians, anecdotal evidence suggests that some musicians may better identify pitches played on their primary instrument than pitches played on other instruments, an ability called Instrument-Specific Absolute Pitch (ISAP). This project, a collaboration between Dr. Reymore and Dr. Niels Christian Hansen, is aimed at identifying the prevalence of and mechanisms behind this phenomenon.

Resources for popular music analysis and interpretation

There currently aren't that many resources out there to study popular music performance, cognition, and perception. Our goal in this area is to establish a variety of digital databases for hypothesis testing and use by other researchers. Pursuits include encoding live performances for pertinent structural information such as form, harmony, and fret coordinates, creating a repository of backbeat types in top-40 popular music, and developing novel software and analysis techniques for audio-visual musical artifacts. This area also focuses on outreach, aiming to demonstrate how our findings are relevant to a wide range of audiences, not just musicians.

Publications

Timbre Semantics

Reymore, L. (2023). Variations in timbre qualia with register and dynamics in the oboe and French horn. Empirical Musicology Review. 16(2), 231-275. https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v16i2.8005

Reymore, L., Noble, J., Saitis, C., Traube, C., & Wallmark, Z. (2023). Timbre semantic associations vary both between and within instruments: An empirical study incorporating register and pitch height. Music Perception. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2023.40.3.253

Reymore, L., Beauvais-Lacasse, E., Smith, B.K., & McAdams, S. (2022). Modeling noise-related timbre semantic categories of orchestral instrument sounds with audio features, pitch register, and instrument family. Frontiers in Psychology. 13:796422. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.796422

Reymore, L. (2021). Characterizing prototypical musical instrument timbres with Timbre Trait Profiles. Musicae Scientiae, 26(3) 648–674. https://doi.org/10.1177/10298649211001523

Reymore, L. & Huron, D. (2020). Mapping the cognitive linguistic dimensions of musical instrument timbre. Psychomusicology, 30(3), 124–144. https://doi.org/10.1037/pmu0000263

Popular Music & Embodied Cognition

Gardner, S., & Shea, N. J. (2022). Gestural Perspectives on Popular-Music Performance. Music Theory Online, 28(3). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.22.28.3/mto.22.28.3.gardnershea.html

Shea, N. (2022). The Feel of the Guitar in Popular Music Performance. The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal, 8(3). https://doi.org/10.30535/smtv.8.3

Shea, N. (2020). Descending Bass Schemata and Negative Emotion in Western Song. Empirical Musicology Review, 14(3). https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v14i3-4.6790

N. Shea, C. White, B. Hughes, and D. Vuvan. (Under review). “Effects of Meter and Training on Tonic Perception in Loop-based Popular-music Harmonic Contexts.” Music Perception.

Instrument-Specific Absolute Pitch

Hansen, N.C. & Reymore, L. (2021). Articulatory motor planning and timbral idiosyncrasies as underlying mechanisms of instrument-specific absolute pitch in expert musicians. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247136

Reymore, L. & Hansen, N.C. (2020). A Theory of Instrument-Specific Absolute Pitch. Frontiers in Psychology. 11:560877. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.560877

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion in Music Research

Shea, N. (In press). A Demographic Sampling Model and Database for Addressing Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Bias in Popular-music Empirical Research. Empirical Musicology Review.

Shea, N., Reymore, L., White, C., N. Biamonte, B. Duinker, L. VanHandel, Zeller, M. (Under revision). “Diversity in Music Corpus Development.” Music Theory Online.