Hi! I'm Nick, an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Arizona State University. ​​​​​​​​​​
My research can be best described as a trans-disciplinary exploration of musical understanding — the awareness of musical organization in real time.
I tend to focus on performance and listener cognition to investigate how factors such as instrument design (organology), body kematics, and categorical perception shape music's features during production.
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My studies leverage interdisciplinary techniques including corpus analysis, close readings, motion capture, lexical modeling with supercomputers (coming soon!), and perceptual assessments of meter and harmony in popular music. Many have been conducted as a PI in the CACTUS Music Lab.
As a music theorist, I am deeply fond of traditional analysis and try to interleave it as much as possible to contextualize my empirical approaches, like when discussing the indeterminate nature of open strings in stringed-instrument transformational pitch spaces (also coming soon to Music Theory Spectrum).
For theory teachers, check out my Pedagogy Blog to see how I adopt the principles of Specifications Grading in my undergraduate theory courses to foster remediation and promote fluency. You can also watch my talk on the subject in a recent presentation at the National Association of Schools of Music annual meeting. I'm happy to share any materials if you drop me an email, which you can find on my institution's website.