Music perception and the Hunt Fellowship

Abstract

I was the 1987–1988 Hunt Postdoctoral Research Fellow a lifetime ago. As a mathematics/physics nerd with a love of music, I consider it the greatest privilege of my life to have spent my formative years at the feet of Dr. Arthur Benade at Case Western Reserve University, where I earned my Ph.D. in physics. Art was my mentor and my friend, and I was his last Ph.D. student. I accompanied him to many ASA meetings in the early 1980’s. Although Art’s primary expertise was in the physics of wind instruments, he put me to work on issues of perception of musical sounds in the random sound fields of enclosed spaces. The focus on music perception paved the way for my post-doctoral research in Munich, supported by the Hunt Fellowship, where I worked with Professor Ernst Terhardt at the Technical University of Munich, testing his robust pitch algorithm with genuine musical sounds derived in a reverberant space. The results of that research mainly supported Terhardt’s work. Since then, I have redirected my interests to physics education and undergraduate research and also serve in departmental leadership at Truman State University, a public liberal arts institution in rural northeast Missouri.