Dr. David Sears

Biography

David Sears is an Associate Professor in Music Theory at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Music Cognition & Computation Lab (MCCL) and serves as Editor-in-Chief for Music Perception, an interdisciplinary journal. He completed his PhD in music theory at McGill University and participated in postdoctoral research at the Institute of Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. His research specializes in the perception and cognition of musical traditions in the Western context, employing inference methods associated with cognitive sciences. His published research has explored various topics, including music and global radio, music-language correspondences, music emotion, and popular music analysis. David actively engages with academic communities by attending relevant conferences, such as the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), the SmPC, and the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). His recent works have appeared in esteemed journals, including Music Perception and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. He supports open-access initiatives in music research and conducts large-scale computational behavioral experiments, fostering an environment where he mentors students in their musical research passions.

Research Interests