David Sears

David Sears is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Music Cognition & Computation Lab (MCCL) and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Music Perception: an interdisciplinary journal. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, he completed a PhD in music theory at McGill University in Canada, and a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Institute of Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler University in Austria.

Dr. Sears specializes in the perception and cognition of musical traditions and participant populations both within and beyond the West using the many methods of inference associated with the cognitive sciences. To date, his published research explores topics related to music on the global radio, music-language correspondences, music and emotion, and popular music analysis. See his Google Scholar Profile for a complete listing of his publications. 

Much of the behavioral and computational data associated with his research (stimuli, data sets, analysis scripts, software applications, etc.) is available for download on the open science frameworkand/or Github. 

Dr. Sears is particularly passionate about open-access initiatives in music research, conducting large-scale behavioral and computational experiments, and mentoring students with a passion for music research.

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