Listening Faster

Michael Cuthbert, faculty

A music historian and programmer, Cuthbert has embraced data and statistics hidden inside music. His open-source music21 software powers quantitative research never before possible for musical scores, allowing historians to spot patterns among millions of notes across compositions that may have been written centuries apart. With the aid of a computer, his lab’s work ranges from identifying inauthentic pieces attributed to Bach to charting the role of geography in Chinese folk music to predicting changes in the future of rock chords.