Alumni PhD Students

Dr. Amos Boasson

Amos is a viola player and a conductor. Amos is interested in the relationship between sound and motion; more specifically between changes in pitch and their possible covert motor concomitants. In his Ph.D. dissertation he has shown effects of the direction and magnitude of pitch changes on timing in tapping tasks, and indices of motor behavior (acceleration and EMG responses). He is now working on his third publication in which he extends his findings to a different change-detection paradigm using also brain measures including the very early ABR &FFR (frequency following response).

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Dr. Naji Esmaeel

Naji is a buzuk player, a music educator, and a pharmacist. In his Ph.D. dissertation he contrasted similarity based versus rule-based approaches to categorization of and modulation between the scales within the Arabic scale system (maqamat). Following an analysis of 100 songs from the Egyptian repertoire of Arabic classical music of the 1940s to 1960s he outlined a general rule which defines the set of possibilities of modulation from one maqam to another. In addition he built a mathematical model for predicting the similarity between pairs of maqamat. He tested these two hypothesized constructs empirically both quantitatively and qualitatively through experiments and interviews with Arabic musicians.

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Dr. Sarig Sela

Sarig is a recorder player specializing in early music and 21st-century music. He has graduated with a BSc. degree in mathematics and computer science and served for 20 years as a chief technologist in leading R&D teams in Israel, Switzerland, and the UK. Recently, he received a position as a lecturer in the faculty of engineering in the Ruppin Academic Center. His work in computational musicology focused on the relationship between theory and practice as reflected in the division ornamentation practice (DOP) of the 16th-century. In 3 publications he examines quantitatively and qualitatively the manuals of ornamentation practice of a selection of composers in the 16th century and compares them to actual pieces with written divisions. He also examines this tradition as a form of online communication showing its characteristics abide by the laws of Zipf in terms of linguistic communication.

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