About

Leigh VanHandel is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of British Columbia.

Her research interests include music cognition, music theory pedagogy, the relationship between music and language, computer applications in music research and pedagogy, and how all of those things relate to each other.

She has presented at numerous regional, national, and international conferences and has been published in such journals as the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Music Perception, the Journal of New Music Research, and Empirical Musicology Review. She is editor of and a contributor to The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy (Routledge Press, 2020), and is the author of Music Theory Skill Builder, a web-based fundamentals development environment licensed and distributed by Oxford University Press. In 2018 she was appointed to the College Board Advanced Placement Music Theory Development Committee, and was also elected to the Executive Board of the Society for Music Theory. From 2005-2020 she taught at Michigan State University, where she held a courtesy appointment in Cognitive Science and was involved in Devin McAuley’s Timing, Attention, and Perception Lab (TAP Lab).

Education

2005: Ph.D. in Music Theory and Acoustics, Stanford University
1994: Masters of Arts in Music Theory, State University of New York at Stony Brook
1992: Bachelor of Arts in Music Theory, The Ohio State University

Blog Posts

    Publications

    VanHandel, L. (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy (2020), an edited volume with Routledge Press.

    VanHandel, L. (forthcoming 2022) “nPVI as a musicological tool.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies, ed. by Daniel Shanahan, Ashley Burgoyne, and Ian Quinn.

    Gotham, M., Jonas, P., Bower, B., Bosworth, W., Rootham, D., and VanHandel, L. (2018) “Scores of Scores: an OpenScore project to encode and share sheet music.” In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology.

    VanHandel, L. (2018) “Relation between melodic characteristics and tempo determination.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition/European Society for the Cognition of Music.

    VanHandel, L. (2016) “The war of the Romantics: An alternate hypothesis using nPVI for the quantitative anthropology of music.” Empirical Musicology Review,, Vol. 11, No. 2.

    VanHandel, L. (2014) Articles in Thomson, W.F.(Ed), Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Encylopedia. (Articles: Chords. Modulation. Rules of voice-leading. Scales.) Sage Publications Inc., New York.

    Temperley, D. and VanHandel, L., Eds. (2013) Special Issues on Corpus Methods. Music Perception, Vol. 31/1, September 2013, and Vol. 31/3, January 2014. [This is a two volume series focusing on corpus methods in music cognition and perception. Temperley and I served as co-editors of the two volumes.]

    VanHandel, L. and Temperley, D. (2014) “Introduction to the Second Special Issue on Corpus Methods.”Music Perception, Vol. 31/3, February 2014.

    Temperley, D. and VanHandel, L. (2013) “Introduction to the Special Issues on Corpus Methods.” Music Perception, Vol. 31/1, September 2013.

    VanHandel, L. (2013) Music Theory Skill Builder: An online musical fundamentals environment. Oxford University Press.

    VanHandel, L. (2012) “What can music theory pedagogy learn from mathematics pedagogy?” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Vol. 26.

    VanHandel, L. and M. Callahan. (2012) “The role of phrase location in key identification by pitch class distribution.” In E. Cambouropoulos, C. Tsougras, K. Mavromatis, K. Pastiadis (Eds.), Proceedings of ICMPC-ESCOM 12 (Thessaloniki, Greece).

    VanHandel, L. (2012) “Using computer-based music fundamentals drills to reinforce learning with adaptive strategies.” Tehnologii Informatice si de comunicatie in domeniul muzica (Information, Communication and Techcnology in Musical Fields. Music Academy Gheorghe Dima, Romania.

    VanHandel, L. (2011) Supplemental electronic and online material for 2nd edition of Clendinning/Marvin,The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis. Contracted by W.W. Norton & Company.

    VanHandel, L. and T. Song. (2010) “The role of meter in compositional style in 19th century French and German art song.” Journal of New Music Research, 39(1), 1-11.

    VanHandel, L., J. Wakefield, and W. Wilkins. (2011) “Towards the role of working memory in pitch processing in language and music.” In J. Hawkins, I. Cross, M. Rohrmeier and P. Rebuschat (Eds.), Language and Music as Cognitive Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    VanHandel, L. (2009) “National metrical types in nineteenth century art song.” Empirical Musicology Review, 4(4), 134-145.

    VanHandel, L. and B. Rhodes. (2009) mfp: An online music fundamentals environment. Software produced in conjunction with Michigan State University’s Virtual University Design and Technology group, licensed by Oxford University Press.

    VanHandel, L. and T. Song (2009) “Influence of Linguistic Rhythm on Individual Compositional Style in 19th Century French and German Art Song.” In Proceedings of ESCOM 2009: 7th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, Jyväskylä, Finland, 2009. (download)

    VanHandel, L. (2007) Supplemental electronic and online material for Clendinning/Marvin, The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis. Online and supplemental materials for the Clendinning/Marvin textbook series, W.W. Norton & Company. Electronic resource available online from W.W. Norton.

    VanHandel, L. (2006) “Trends in/over time: Rhythm in speech and music in 19th century art song.” InProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Music and Perception and Cognition. Bologna, Italy: Bononia University Press, 2006.

    VanHandel, L. (2006) “Trends in/over time: Rhythm in speech and musical melody in 19th century art song.” In SMC06: Third Sound and Music Computing Conference Proceedings. Marseille, France: GMEM – Centre National de Creation Musicale, 2006.

    Larson, S., and L. VanHandel. (2005) “Measuring Musical Forces,” Music Perception Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 119-136.

    Projects

    The Tempo Project: an experimental project studying how musical characteristics (melodic, rhythmic, harmonic) play a role in tempo determination (how fast or slow a piece of music “should” go).

    Cognition and pedagogy: investigating recent research into the cognition of learning, and applying findings to music theory pedagogy.

    Memberships

    Society for Music Theory, Society for Music Perception and Cognition, Music Theory Midwest

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