The music of Billy Joel is long overdue for prolonged attention from the scholarly field. As Walter Everett has acknowledged (2000), Joel’s music is often more in line with common-practice systems than with popular genres, and when combined with his intuitive understanding of numerous popular styles, makes for a rich trove of harmonic interest. O…[Read more]

Research in music perception has typically focused on common-practice music (tonal music from the Western European tradition, ca. 1750–1900) as a model of Western musical structure. However, recent research indicates that different styles within Western tonal music may follow distinct harmonic syntaxes. The current study investigated whether l…[Read more]

A dissertation describing analytical methods for engaging with “flow,” i.e. a rapper’s delivery of the lyrics.

Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch has brought interactive film to the forefront of ludo-entertainment discourse. Released through the Netflix entertainment platform in December 2018, the film features a non-linear script that the viewer guides through a series of choices. By virtue of design, Bandersnatch places a larger emphasis on narratological e…[Read more]

Popular music of the 1980s is remembered today as having a “sound” that is somehow unified and generalizable. The ’80s sound is tied to the electric piano preset of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. Not only was this preset (E. PIANO 1) astonishingly prevalent—heard in up to 61% of #1 hits on the pop, country, and R&B Billboard charts in 1986—bu…[Read more]