About the Author
Yuri Broze is a music theorist and cognitive scientist whose research investigates how music exploits biological perceptual systems — particularly those attuned to the sounds of other humans. His academic work focuses on the cultural and biological evolution of musical creation, the perception of animacy cues in sound, and the nature of anthropomimesis in sonic signals.
Broze earned his Ph.D. in Music Theory and M.S. in Statistics from The Ohio State University in 2013, where he was a Distinguished University Fellow in the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory under David Huron. His doctoral research combined experimental psychology, corpus analysis, and computational methods to study how musical lines mimic characteristics of human voice, gait, and language. Earlier, he received his B.S. in Chemistry with a second major in Music from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating summa cum laude.
His published work in Music Perception and the Empirical Musicology Review spans polyphonic voice multiplicity and emotion perception, pitch-speed relationships in western composition, and diachronic changes in jazz harmony. At Ohio State, he designed and taught twelve undergraduate courses in music theory, following the pedagogy of Fux and Haydn, with a focus on aural skills and harmonic comprehension.
Broze's research interests extend to memetic analysis of musical trends, pedagogical approaches to music theory through interactive technology, and the history of amateur musicians — particularly the English catch clubs of the 16th through 18th centuries and their subsequent evolution into glee clubs and barbershop quartets.
He is also a lifelong choral singer, having directed and performed with a cappella ensembles and glee clubs across the country, and a multi-instrumentalist with training in clarinet, piano, and voice.