Invited Speakers

Nina Eidsheim (she/her) is the author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music; co-editing Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies; Co-editor of the Refiguring American Music book series for Duke University Press. She received her bachelor of music from the voice program at the Agder Conservatory (Norway); MFA in vocal performance from the California Institute of the Arts; and Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of California, San Diego. Eidsheim is Professor of Musicology at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and founder and director of the UCLA Practice-based Experimental Epistemology (PEER) Lab, an experimental research Lab dedicated to decolonializing data, methodology, and analysis, in and through multisensory creative practices. Current projects include a book collaboration with Wadada Leo Smith and a multi-model project that will map networks of metaphors that structure musical community, discourse, and practice. 

Kevin C. Holt is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests include American popular music and issues of race class & gender as they manifest in popular culture. In addition to ethnomusicology, Holt’s disciplinary specialties include Africana studies, hip-hop studies, performance studies, and women’s, gender & sexuality studies. Holt earned his BA in Africana studies and his BMus in performance on the double bass from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music respectively in 2008. He obtained an MA through Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies (now the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department) before entering the doctoral program in Columbia University’s Department of Music, which he completed in 2018. In 2020, he joined Wesleyan University’s African American Studies Department as their inaugural Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow. Holt was a 2024 Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

Nicole Biamonte is currently Associate Professor of Music Research in the Music Theory area at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She has a baccalaureate in piano from the State University of New York at Purchase, and masters' and doctoral degrees in music theory from Yale University. Before coming to McGill, she taught at Skidmore College and the University of Iowa. Nicole Biamonte's primary research area is the theory and analysis of popular music. She has published on tonal and harmonic structures, form, and meter and rhythm in pop-rock and related genres, and is excited to explore the understudied parameters of timbre and texture in these musics.  Her secondary research area is music theory pedagogy, and she is also interested in chromatic harmony and in 19th-century musical historicism. 

Megan Lavengood (she/her) is Associate Professor and Director of Music Theory at George Mason University. Her research primarily deals with popular music, timbre, synthesizers, and recording techniques. Her article on the iconic Yamaha DX7 electric piano sound appears in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and her methodology for timbre analysis is described an article in Music Theory Online. Her current research project focuses on pedagogy of timbre analysis in the theory classroom. As a pedagogue, she focuses on incorporating popular music as a step toward inclusivity of music students from non-traditional backgrounds. She has headed teams that won grants to redesign GMU’s core theory curriculum to be modular instead of sequential and to substantially expand the open educational resource Open Music Theory. She is a soprano in the Schola Cantorum at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC.

Claire McLeish works as a musicologist and copyright researcher for Third Side Music, an independent music publisher based in Montréal. She also offers forensic musicologist consulting, working on infringements, sample uses, and public domain issues for clients based in Canada and the US. In her capacity as a music historian and copyright expert, Claire has been interviewed by CBC and Radio-Canada. She holds an MA in Popular Music and Culture from Western University (2013) and a Ph.D. in Musicology from McGill University (2020). 

Lindsey Reymore is an assistant professor of Music Theory in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre and co-director of the CACTUS Music Lab at ASU. Her research investigates the role of timbre—the perceptual qualities or characteristics of sound—in musical experience. To study how timbre interacts with meaning, cognition, and musical form, she designs interdisciplinary methodologies, synthesizing approaches from behavioral psychology and signal processing in combination with music analysis. Her research has been published in journals including Frontiers in Psychology, PLOS One, Music Perception, and Musicae Scientiae. Reymore completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University and holds a PhD in Music Theory from The Ohio State University as well as degrees in oboe performance from The University of Texas at Austin (MM) and Vanderbilt University (BMus).