I am finishing my dissertation soon and am applying for full-time academic jobs. Here’s my research statement. Also see my teaching statement.
I have three main areas of research interest: the teaching and learning of rhythm and groove; the challenges of hip-hop pedagogy; and expanding the teaching of harmony to include groove-based musics, particularly the blues. I address each of these areas in turn.
Rhythm and Groove
Rhythm, groove, syncopation and swing are rarely mentioned in music theory contexts, but they are foundational to the Afrodiasporic musics that form the basis of the United States’ popular culture. One of my signature accomplishments is my work with New York University’s Music Experience Design Lab to develop the Groove Pizza. This is an online circular rhythm programming and visualization tool that grew out of my masters thesis in the NYU Music Technology program. Rhythms are displayed as geometric figures, which can be directly manipulated. For example, users can displace patterns rhythmically by rotating the corresponding shapes on the circle. The Groove Pizza has been used by millions of people around the world, including hundreds of classroom teachers.
The Groove Pizza differs most from standard drum machines in the way that it represents rhythm timelines geometrically. When two cells in a ring are activated, the app automatically draws a line segment connecting them. When three or more cells in a ring are filled, the app draws a filled geometric shape with a vertex at each cell. If the user places kick drums on each quarter note (the ubiquitous “four on the floor” dance rhythm), it appears as a square tilted on its corner. The popular tresillo rhythm (two dotted eighth notes followed by a regular eighth note) appears as an approximate hexagon. The app includes a Shapes menu that enables users to place triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons and octagons onto the grid. If the shape does not fit evenly into the number of cells in the ring, the app places the vertices into the nearest available cells using the Euclidean algorithm. Placing shapes in this way creates maximally even rhythms that are nearly always musically satisfying.
Beyond its aesthetic appeal, circular geometric rhythm visualization opens up forms of conceptual understanding that are more difficult with traditional linear notation schemes. Periodicity and meter depend on relationships between nonadjacent events. The relationship between, say, the second and fourth beats of a measure of 4/4 time is not automatically apparent in notation, but it is obvious on the circle. Visual symmetries correspond neatly to aural symmetries and vice versa. Circular visualization also gives insight into what makes traditional rhythms like clave patterns so compelling even after an enormous number of repetitions. Son clave has an axis of reflective symmetry between the fourth and twelfth beats of the pattern which is considerably harder to discern in linear notation.
I am particularly proud of the way that the Groove Pizza illuminates swing. The ”slices” alternately expand and contract in width according to the amount of swing specified. As the user adjusts the swing control, the slices dynamically change their width accordingly, giving real-time visual and auditory feedback to the user. Because the Groove Pizza is agnostic as to its temporal resolution, users are free to swing eighth or sixteenth notes by mentally choosing a different temporal resolution.
Software development can be a useful research method because it involves the externalization of domain and learning theories and assumptions, and makes them available for experimentation and reflection. In this way, software acts as a mirror on researcher understanding, an embodiment of the learning theories, and a facilitator of domain activities. In other words, the software itself becomes a concrete manifestation of the designer’s theories and assumptions, stated and unstated. The process of development involves the continual proposing and evaluation of hypotheses, and incorporating the lessons learned into subsequent iterations of the software. Rather than waiting for the study to end before drawing conclusions, researchers gather conclusions constantly, and can apply them to each iteration of the design.
Software connects symbolic representations (e.g. graphs or music notation) and the physical world (e.g. keys pressed on a controller or sound coming out of a speaker). Human learning can be viewed as a process of transforming symbol systems into action and vice versa. Modern music interfaces abstract music signals into control signals. At the physical level, digital audio production tools consist of control signals that provide parameters to software synthesizers. Designers of such tools are free to metaphorically represent the control signals in any way that imagination can conceive. I am eager to continue to research and develop new interactive learning tools that will afford new learning methods, especially for those aspects of music that have been neglected by formal pedagogy.
Hip-Hop Pedagogy
My doctoral dissertation is proposal to incorporate hip-hop into the education of preservice music teachers at the university level, both as a content area and a set of methods and approaches. In the first phase of the study, I present in-depth profiles of three New York based educators and teaching artists whose practice uses hip-hop music, aesthetics, and values to advance social justice goals. I then discuss putting these educators’ approaches into practice in a popular music course of my own in the Music Education program at New York University’s Steinhardt School. Finally, I propose a framework and a set of methods for hip-hop education in teacher preparation and professional development.
Hip-hop works at a personal level as an avenue for self-expression, and it works at a social level as a lens for racial and class issues. Because popular music is both culturally significant and ideologically contested, its study can be a site of contesting and developing democratic virtues. Hip-hop’s tradition of sampling and remixing are especially useful for speaking back to and critiquing culture. Hip-hop is the most popular youth music in the United States, but it is scarce in music education, and it faces steep obstacles to inclusion. Hip-hop musicians who wish to obtain music teaching licensure must first gain a range of competencies in the Western ”art” music tradition. Meanwhile, music teachers who might want to incorporate hip-hop’s musical content, aesthetics or creative processes must usually venture far beyond their knowledge base and stylistic comfort zone in order to do so.
In order to explore the question of how best to include hip-hop in the music classroom, I first address larger questions about the goals and values of music education. Hip-hop presents unprecedented opportunities for advancing the goals of culturally responsive pedagogy, and it is a natural complement to the goal of centering student creativity. However, hip-hop also poses challenges to the music education field, as a music, as a cultural practice, and as a pedagogy. I argue that to study hip-hop music, it is necessary to also engage its culture. We cannot approach hip-hop through the study of its products alone, because it is not merely a music genre, but rather, a distinct worldview with related sensibilities and epistemologies that can inform teaching and learning. Hip-hop pedagogy should not just treat hip-hop as curriculum content, but also more broadly, as a way of being in the world.
Hip-hop’s learning methods are drastically different from those of formal music education. Emcees and producers begin writing or improvising original music at the immediate outset of their musical journey. In school music, by contrast, students spend many years learning existing repertoire. In classical music, composition is a rarefied activity, undertaken only by people who have mastered a broad variety of techniques and concepts. Since music teacher training is largely undertaken within classical music institutions, in-service teachers rarely have experience with songwriting or production. However, I argue that centering creative expression is the only way to engage hip-hop in a meaningful way.
Groove Harmony and the Blues
While I am interested in expanding music theory pedagogy beyond its near-exclusive focus on harmony, there are also aspects of harmony whose teaching I am interested in developing as well. European tonal theory is of limited usefulness for analyzing the harmonies of groove-based musics, especially the blues. Grooves are often harmonically static, and may lack triadic harmony entirely, but they are still rich in structures of tension and release. This framework is especially important for understanding hip-hop, where pitch structures may lie entirely outside of piano-key pitches but are nevertheless meaningful and ordered.
The blues is commonly described as a combination of African rhythms and European harmonies, but this description is inaccurate. Blues follows harmonic conventions that are quite different from those of Western European common practice. Blues harmony does not fit into major or minor tonality, and it frequently violates the “rules” of voice leading and chord function. But blues listeners do not experience the music as strange or dissonant. Instead, they hear an alternative form of consonance. In order to make sense of this fact, we need to understand blues as belonging to its own system of tonality, distinct from major, minor and modal scales. Because blues tonality is so widespread and important in Western music, I argue that we should teach it as part of the basic music theory curriculum.
I am also interested in exploring the hypothesis that the blues originated in just intonation intervals derived from the natural harmonics of scale degrees I and IV. By this theory, when blues musicians bend notes, they are not trying to make them go out of tune; instead, they are playing them more in tune. If students only learn the harmonies of Western European tradition, then they will struggle to understand the blues-based harmonies that pervade the contemporary musical landscape. I have met many excellent musicians in the blues, rock, dance and hip-hop idioms who abandoned their study of music theory because they were discouraged by its seeming irrelevance to their needs.
Music is a site where social and political values are contested, symbolically or directly. By failing to engage harmony that does not descend from Western Europe, traditional harmony pedagogy reveals the lingering effects of the music academy’s white racial frame, as Philip Ewell describes it. I hope to use my research and teaching to expand music theory beyond the white racial frame.