Faculty & Staff

Richard Freedman (Project Co-director and replacement Director) has been Professor of Music at Haverford College since 1986. He earned his PhD in the History and Theory of Music from the University of Pennsylvania, and has a distinguished record of working at the intersection of technology and historical musicology. He was Digital and Multimedia Scholarship Editor for the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Director of the Tri-College Digital Humanities Initiative for Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore Colleges (2012–14). Freedman was also co-director of The Lost Voices Project, partially funded by the NEH, and is currently leader of the digital project, Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass (CRIM), which centers on the so-called parody mass of the sixteenth-century, offering a highly innovative space for the analysis, annotation, and collaborative exploration of this repertory. He will lead a day-long workshop on analyzing sixteenth-century counterpoint, a week-long workshop (along with Reba Wissner) on incorporating technology into the music studies classroom, and (with Julie Cumming) facilitate the first day of introductions and opening activities.

Chris White is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. White received his PhD from Yale University, and is an expert in using big-data techniques to study how we hear and write music, which is the subject of his book, The Music in The Data (Routledge, 2022). His articles have appeared in such venues as Music Perception, Music Theory Online, and Music Theory Spectrum. He has also contributed essays
to Slate, The Daily Beast, and the Chicago Tribune on a wide range of topics, including music analysis, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence. White (along with Megan Kaes Long) will lead a multi-day workshop on creating a corpus of symbolic scores and using digital tools to answer important research questions.

Reba Wissner is Associate Professor of Musicology at Columbus State University. She received her MFA and PhD from Brandeis University and holds a Graduate Certificate in Instructional Design from the University of Wisconsin–Stout. Although currently conducting research on film music and ludomusicology, Wissner began her career as a scholar of seventeenth-century Venetian opera. She is an expert in musicology and pedagogy with a particular focus on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and has a volume forthcoming from Routledge entitled Universal Design for Learning in Music History Classes: A Teacher’s Guide. Her other areas of expertise encompass computational musicology, including music encoding, music pedagogy, artificial intelligence, and digital accessibility (i.e., ensuring that people with different needs can access visual, aural, and digital musical materials). She will lead a week- long workshop (with Richard Freedman) on incorporating technology in the classroom.

Jennifer Bain is Professor of Musicology at Dalhousie University. She received her PhD from Stony Brook University and is an expert on medieval music and the modern reception of the music of Hildegard of Bingen, as well as issues surrounding the role of women in the production and composition of music. With substantial experience in the digital analysis of music, Bain serves as principal investigator on the project Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT). Along with Debra Lacoste, Bain will lead a one-day workshop on digital resources for the study of plainchant.

Karen Desmond is Professor of Music at Maynooth University in Ireland. Holder of a PhD in musicology from New York University, she specializes in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century music, particularly the developments in music notation that underpinned medieval music making. She is currently principal investigator for the five-year, two million–euro ERC Consolidator grant project titled BROKENSONG (2023–28) that examines polyphonic singing and written culture in late-medieval Britain and Ireland. She has also worked extensively on fourteenth-century music notation systems and is author of Music and the moderni, 1300–1350: The ars nova in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 AMS Lewis Lockwood Prize. Her Measuring Polyphony project was awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for the development of an online mensural music editor ”Measuring Polyphony.” Desmond will lead a day-long workshop, along with Martha Thomae, on computer tools for transcribing mensural notation.

Ichiro Fujinaga is Canada Research Chair in Music Information Retrieval and Professor in the Music Technology Area of the Department of Music Research at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. He has bachelor’s degrees in Music/Percussion
and Mathematics from the University of Alberta, and a master’s degree in Music Theory and a PhD in Music Technology from McGill University. In 2003–4, he was the Acting Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) at McGill. In 2002–3 and 2009–12, he was the Chair of the Music Technology Area at the School of Music. Before that, he was a faculty member of the Computer Music Department at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. Research interests include music theory, machine learning, music perception, digital signal processing, genetic algorithms, and music information acquisition, preservation, and retrieval. He will lead a day-long workshop on the issues, strategies, and challenges of putting together a major digital humanities music project, focusing on finding funding sources, writing a strong application, and developing an international team of experts.

Debra Lacoste is Project Manager and Principal Researcher of CANTUS: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant, a twenty-five-year-old online digital archive of medieval manuscript inventories, and Project Manager of the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT) project. Lacoste is also a consultant for the project “Doctrine, devotion, and cultural expression in the cults of medieval Iberian saints” at the University of Bristol, and has been an active partner in several other chant research teams, including the “Neumes Interest Group” of the Music Encoding Initiative. She served a term as Digital and Multimedia Editor for the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017–19) and holds a PhD in Systematic Musicology from the University of Western Ontario, where her research and dissertation focused on some of the earliest medieval ecclesiastical chant books. Along with Jennifer Bain, Lacoste will lead a day-long workshop on digital resources available for the study of plainchant.

Cory McKay is Professor of Music and Humanities at Marianopolis College. He received his PhD, MA, and BSc from McGill University, is a regular member of McGill’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), and also works as private research consultant specializing in machine learning and music. McKay’s current research as a co-investigator in the LinkedMusic, Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA), and MIRAI projects focuses on using machine learning and statistical analysis to find and understand patterns in early music. His industry work focuses on researching and refining automatic music production algorithms. He is also the primary designer of the jMIR software framework for performing multimodal music information retrieval (MIR) research, which includes the jSymbolic tool for extracting musical features from digital scores. Along with Julie Cumming, McKay will lead a one-day workshop on corpus studies and feature extraction.

Emiliano Ricciardi is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Holder of a PhD from Stanford University, his main research area is the late Italian madrigal, with an emphasis on the settings of Torquato Tasso’s poetry. He is the director and general editor of the Tasso in Music Project, a digital edition of the musical settings of Tasso’s poetry, which received funding in July 2016 from the NEH in the form of a three-year Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant. Ricciardi has published articles and reviews in journals such as Early Music, Journal of Musicology, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Renaissance Quarterly. Along with Craig Sapp, he will lead a one-day workshop on using the Tasso in Music Project and tools for studying music and poetry online.

Craig Sapp is Adjunct Professor of Music at Stanford University, where he has worked extensively on digital music research, developing the infrastructure for the Josquin Research Project and the Tasso in Music Project, two pioneering early-music platforms that provide both printable and digital scores for performance and computational analysis. The Tasso in Music Project is currently supported by an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. Sapp is author of the dissertation Computation methods for the analysis of musical structure and is an expert in computer-based music theory and acoustics. Along with Emiliano Ricciardi, Sapp will lead a one-day workshop on using the Tasso in Music Project and on developing tools for studying music and poetry online.

Martha Thomae is a postdoctoral research fellow for the ECHOES projectat the NOVA University of Lisbon, where she leads a project for the development of tools to facilitate the search and analysis of chants encoded in the MEI music format. Holder of a PhD in Music Technology from McGill University, she has worked as a research assistant for the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project at the Distributed Digital Musical Archives and Libraries (DDMAL) Lab and was a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), where she served as student coordinator of the Music Information Research axis of CIRMMT from 2017–19. Thomae’s research focuses on the preservation and encoding of mensural music and she has developed tools to facilitate the encoding of this repertoire, including the Mensural MEI Translator and the Automatic Scoring-up Tool. Her PhD dissertation focused on digitizing and encoding Guatemalan polyphonic choir books from the colonial period. Along with Karen Desmond, Thomae will lead a day-long workshop on computer tools for transcribing mensural notation.