Music and Language

I play cello and studied music seriously for quite a long time. As a performer, I have the most experience with classical and modern repertoire, although I've dabbled in other areas. During the 4 years I lived in Seattle, I served as principal cellist of the Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra, but now I just play for fun when I have time.

Before I ended up in linguistics, I spent a few years thinking I wanted to be a music theorist. Although I'm not the first linguist who's interested in applying modern theories of syntax and cognition science to music, I think there is quite a bit that both fields can learn from each other.

I have occassionally been inspired by techniques in computational linguistics to do fun things with music, such as building a chorale harmonizer that used Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) trained on Bach's chorales.