Associate Professor of Music Theory
(812) 855-0296
isaacso@indiana.edu

See also: my personal home page

Ph.D., Indiana University, 1992

I am interested pitch relations in, and cognitive models, of post-tonal music. One branch of my work is concerned with the assessment of similarity between analytical "objects." This research has so far concentrated on context-free measures of interval-class similarity betwee n pitch-class set classes. Present work involves studying the effects of musical context on these measures through connectionist models. A second branch of work involves the use of self-organizing neural networks to study post-tonal music for underlying structural organization.  Courses taught recently include Models of Music Cognition, and Computer Tools for Music Research.

Isaacson, E. J. (1990). Similarity of interval-class content between pitch-class sets: The IcVSIM relation.
Journal of Music Theory, 34: 1-28.

Wittlich, G., Isaacson, E. J., & Hass, J. (1993). Computers in Music Research and Instruction.
In M.C. Yovits (Ed.), Advances in Computers, 35: 112-202. Boston: Academic Press.

Isaacson, E. J. (1996). Issues in the study of similarity in atonal music.
Music Theory Online, 2/7.

Isaacson, E. J. (1997). Neural network models for the study of post-tonal music.
In M. Leman (Ed.), Music, Gestalt, and Computing. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Scott, D. and Isaacson, E. (1998). The Interval Angle: A Similarity Measure for Pitch-class Sets.
Perspectives of New Music, 36: 107-142.