Nicholas Shea

Nicholas is a music theorist, teacher, and interdisciplinary researcher. 

An award-winning scholar, Nicholas’s research intersects with a range of disciplines — primarily music, data science, and behavioral psychology — to develop practitioner-centered perspectives on musical organization and meaning. His work generally falls along three methodological lines: corpus analyses, or the study of large databases of music; behavioral studies, examining how (and sometimes why) people interact with music the way they do; and traditional music-theoretic analysis, or case studies of individual musical works. Each are central to his formulation of networked music theory — how global communities of musicians understand musical organization through performance practices, embodied cognition, and crowdsourced digital artifacts like guitar tablature.

In the classroom, Nicholas is committed to implementing curricular systems that ensure all students have the opportunity to meet a course’s learning outcomes, even if they have less experience than their peers. He also helps students connect music theory to their lived experiences by framing course topics in terms of music perception and cognition.