Carol Rifelj Lecture Series, Nicholas Shea

Fretboard Networks: Musical Understanding in the Self-Taught Musician Digital Ecosystem

As many as 72 million people play guitar, yet most don’t go on tour or make records. Instead, “…people want to play quietly and solo in their own home, singing along with their favorite songs,” notes Fender CEO Andy Mooney. In this talk, Nicholas explores how self-guided guitar instruction contributes to musical understanding — the awareness of musical organization in time — within an online community of mostly amateur and semi-professional guitarists. Drawing on sociolinguistics, embodied cognition, and data science, Nicholas offers practical insights into how the body, mind, and ear coordinate to signal genre and create coherent musical utterances in guitar-driven styles.