The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance announces that David Sears will join the Department of Music Theory as an associate professor this fall. Sears will direct the Music Cognition and Computation Lab (MCCL) and serve as editor-in-chief of Music Perception: an interdisciplinary journal.
“I’m honored to join the faculty of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance at the University of Michigan, and in so doing, to count myself among a cohort of scholars I have long admired,” said Sears. “I’m equally excited to contribute my own work in music perception and cognition and music informatics to a music theory department with a rich tradition of interdisciplinary, forward-thinking research and pedagogy.”
Sears specializes in the perception and cognition of musical traditions both within and beyond the West, using the many methods of inference associated with the experimental and computational sciences. To date, his research has received financial support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and appears in venues related to music theory and analysis, experimental psychology, and music information retrieval. For his current project, Music Informatics for Radio Across the GlobE (MIRAGE), he developed an open-access database and accompanying online dashboard that allow researchers to access, interact with, and export information about music streamed on internet radio.
“We are excited to welcome David Sears, whose expertise in music perception and cognition complements the research specialties of faculty in the Department of Music Theory,” shared René Rusch, associate professor and chair of the department. “His work in these and related areas will further expand the department’s collaborations with other units within SMTD and across the university.”
Sears received dual BA degrees from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and a PhD from McGill University. He held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. Sears previously served on the faculty at Texas Tech University.