My research combines ethnographic, musicological, analytical/emprical and cognitive approaches. My most recent works have investigated the construction and perception of time, tempo and rhythm in Balinese music.

Current projects include an article on music in the independence-era Malay films of P. Ramlee and developing a manuscript proposal on Balinese experimental music.

I am currently keeping a blog of my summer research in Ghana, Britain, Indonesia and Amsterdam.

Some of my recent research has experimented with the use and modification of the Implicit Association Test.

The IAT test (see https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ ) has been used for over a decade to explore implicit (unconscious) attitudes about a wide variety of phenomena.

Modifying the tests is relatively easy and generic versions of the scripts can be found and downloaded at:

http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/iat_materials.htm.

In order to run these tests, which are only for PC at this point, you need to download and run them in the Millisecond software package. A trial version of this can be found at:

http://millisecond.com/

I have created three modifications for investigating how music (and ideas about music) are processed in the brain.

The first test investigated the possible connections between concepts of time-in-music and –time-in-general might be linked in the minds of Balinese musicians. This test is in Indonesian (and Balinese) . A paper which discusses this test (among other issues) will be appearing in the journal Empirical Musicology Review and can be found here.

The second test investigates the potential for timbre to be gendered. Because the IAT test is based upon latency, long examples of music cannot be used. But timbrel (tone color) information is available to the listener all at once. Here I test to see if complex/distorted noises are associated more strongly with masculine, than feminine categories. This is a 1.0 version. Download all of the files, put them in the same folder, and run the test (with working speakers) within Millisecond.

The third test investigates the potential for timbre to be associated with ethnicity. Here I test to see if “Asian” (East and Southeast Asian) timbres (from local recordings) are associated with “Asian” facial features presented in images. This is a 1.0 version. Download all of the files, put them in the same folder, and run the test (with working speakers) within Millisecond.