Josh Albrecht
PhD Student, Music Theory
| albrecht.89@osu.edu |
Education
I received my bachelor's in Music History/Theory from The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. In 2007, I graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a Master's degree in Music Theory. I began my doctoral work at Ohio State University in 2009. I am currently ABD and plan to finish in June. For futher biographical data, feel free to check out my curriculum vitae.
Research Interests
At The University of Texas I first got interested in Cognitive Musicology through both a course taught by Edward Pearsall and by Leonard Meyer's writings. Information Theory seemed to be a promising way to tease out some interesting things with how music works cognitively, so I wrote my Master's thesis on the subject of applying Information Theory to analyses of music. I'm still quite interested in this, but my perspective has broadened out quite a bit.
My dissertation will focus on what David Huron and I are calling the "affective flux" of music. This is something similar to what the continuous data collection folks are doing, but we're using a progressive exposure method to allow the listeners to introspect a bit more and hopefully clear up some of the noise in the data. We hope to approach the question of how musical characteristics influence affective perceptions of music from a new direction.
Recently, I've been interested in how scale usage has changed over time, specifically from the period of the modes into tonality. The Krumhansl-Kessler key profiles map nicely onto actual usage of scale degrees for common-practice tonality, so I modified the profiles to reflect usage in several 50-year epochs. I used a cluster analysis method of determining how many modes were is use in a given period and what the scale-degree profiles looked like. I found evidence that in the 1550-1600 epoch, the minor mode branched into two modes that looked a lot like Dorian and Aeolian. It also seems that in 1400-1450, there appears to be a hint of Phrygian showing up. I'm putting the paper on this together for submission for publication now.
Publications
Albrecht, J. & Huron, D. (2010) An Analysis Of Affective Content In The Second Movement Of Beethoven's Pathétique Using An Acoustic Ethological Model. Demorest, S. ed. Proceedings of the International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition.
