Nicholas J Shea
Biographic Data
| ID | 7525966 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas J Shea |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas J |
| FAMILY NAME | Shea |
| SIGNATURE | SHEA N J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3341-4413 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Representation in Cognitive Science
Our thoughts are meaningful. We think about things in the outside world; how can that be so? This is one of the deepest questions in contemporary philosophy. Ever since the 'cognitive revolution', states with meaning-mental representations-have been the key explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences. But there is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. Powerful new methods in cognitive neuroscience ca…
Response to Trevor de Clercq (2025)
Metric Accent Affects Perception of Key Center in Pop-Music Chord Loops
Looped chord progressions in popular music can often be heard as having multiple plausible key centers. In a series of two experiments, we investigate meter’s role as an orienting force within these progressions. Both experiments presented listeners with a progression that looped the C major, F major, A minor, and G major triads, a series that could plausibly be heard in multiple keys. While the ordering of the triads remained constant across tri…
Diversity in Music Corpus Studies
"Guitar Thinking" and "Genre Thinking" among an Online Community of Guitarists
Researchers and performers have long intuited that popular music’s organizational features are linked to the physical-tonal properties of the electric guitar. Yet current evidence is either too broad or too specific to support reliable generalizations. Ongoing corpus studies offer remarkable explanatory power in clarifying stylistic trends from a listener’s perspective but are not currently equipped to address the kinesthetic aspects of instrumen…
A Demographic Sampling Model and Database for Addressing Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Bias in Popular-music Empirical Research
This report summarizes the development and application of a demographic encoding model designed to assist researchers in aligning dataset diversity with real-world diversity in popular-music corpus studies. Drawing on sampling strategies in machine-learning research and encoding procedures in health sciences and the humanities, the model and its associated open-access data provides researchers with a tool to generate more inclusive databases alon…
Gestural Perspectives on Popular-Music Performance
Music theory has grown to encompass various forms of bodily movement in analysis, including instrumental performance, dance studies, and cognition-based methods. In this paper, we demonstrate how observed physical gestures in popular-music performance can foreground the relationship between the music’s surface elements and its structural features. Live performances by Macy Gray, Alex Lifeson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe offer various interpretation…
Descending Bass Schemata and Negative Emotion in Western Song
A descending bass line coordinated with sad lyrics is often described as evoking the "lament" topic—a signal to listeners that grief is being conveyed (Caplin, 2014). In human speech, a similar pattern of pitch declination occurs as air pressure is lost ('t Hart, Collier, & Cohen, 1990) which—coordinated with the premise that sad speech is lower in pitch (Lieberman & Michaels, 1962)—suggests there may be a cognitive-ecological association between…
No prominent works on this page.
Descending Bass Schemata and Negative Emotion in Western Song
A descending bass line coordinated with sad lyrics is often described as evoking the "lament" topic—a signal to listeners that grief is being conveyed (Caplin, 2014). In human speech, a similar pattern of pitch declination occurs as air pressure is lost ('t Hart, Collier, & Cohen, 1990) which—coordinated with the premise that sad speech is lower in pitch (Lieberman & Michaels, 1962)—suggests there may be a cognitive-ecological association between…
Gestural Perspectives on Popular-Music Performance
Music theory has grown to encompass various forms of bodily movement in analysis, including instrumental performance, dance studies, and cognition-based methods. In this paper, we demonstrate how observed physical gestures in popular-music performance can foreground the relationship between the music’s surface elements and its structural features. Live performances by Macy Gray, Alex Lifeson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe offer various interpretation…
"Guitar Thinking" and "Genre Thinking" among an Online Community of Guitarists
Researchers and performers have long intuited that popular music’s organizational features are linked to the physical-tonal properties of the electric guitar. Yet current evidence is either too broad or too specific to support reliable generalizations. Ongoing corpus studies offer remarkable explanatory power in clarifying stylistic trends from a listener’s perspective but are not currently equipped to address the kinesthetic aspects of instrumen…
A Demographic Sampling Model and Database for Addressing Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Bias in Popular-music Empirical Research
This report summarizes the development and application of a demographic encoding model designed to assist researchers in aligning dataset diversity with real-world diversity in popular-music corpus studies. Drawing on sampling strategies in machine-learning research and encoding procedures in health sciences and the humanities, the model and its associated open-access data provides researchers with a tool to generate more inclusive databases alon…
Diversity in Music Corpus Studies
Representation in Cognitive Science
Our thoughts are meaningful. We think about things in the outside world; how can that be so? This is one of the deepest questions in contemporary philosophy. Ever since the 'cognitive revolution', states with meaning-mental representations-have been the key explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences. But there is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. Powerful new methods in cognitive neuroscience ca…
Response to Trevor de Clercq (2025)
Metric Accent Affects Perception of Key Center in Pop-Music Chord Loops
Looped chord progressions in popular music can often be heard as having multiple plausible key centers. In a series of two experiments, we investigate meter’s role as an orienting force within these progressions. Both experiments presented listeners with a progression that looped the C major, F major, A minor, and G major triads, a series that could plausibly be heard in multiple keys. While the ordering of the triads remained constant across tri…
Psychology (7 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Music and Audio Processing (3 works) · Music Technology and Sound Studies (3 works) · Neuroscience and Music Perception (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · Anthropology (2 works)