Two scholars in the Bienen School of Music community have received significant awards from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern to support research projects in the 2025-26 academic year.

Daniel Shanahan, associate professor of music theory and cognition, has been named a 2025-26 faculty fellow of the Kaplan Humanities Institute. These competitive residencies allow recipients a teaching reduction in order to pursue independent research projects of significance to the humanities. Fellows serve as core members of the University’s humanities community, engaging in a year-long dialogue with each other and members of the Kaplan community.

Shanahan’s project is called “A History of the Algorithmic Individuation of Music.”

"My book project attempts to provide a prehistory of the algorithmic individuation of music listening by exploring how researchers in the past attempted to encode and analyze the musical experience,” Shanahan said. “Specifically, I explore how the choices made in the early era of digital computing enabled the squishing of a multi-dimensional musical object into a single-line stream to be processed by a mainframe computer, and how these choices have continued to shape how we ask computers to process music to this day."

Shanahan’s research incorporates music-analytic, computational, and experimental methods to better understand the cognitive and communicative constraints of music. His interests include corpus studies, music and emotion, the oral transmission of music, the computational analysis of jazz and folk music, as well as machine learning models and generative artificial intelligence.

Michael Slattery ’20, a PhD candidate in music theory and cognition, has been named a 2025-26 Franke Graduate Fellow. The Franke fellowships bring together four outstanding Northwestern doctoral students in the humanities to cultivate their research and teaching in the interdisciplinary setting of the Kaplan Institute.

Franke Graduate Fellows devote two full-time quarters to shaping their projects during fall and winter. They also receive pedagogical mentoring in developing an undergraduate course that they teach in their home departments in the spring. They also present their research at a forum in the spring.

Slattery's project, titled “The Heavens Are Telling: Cultural Meanings of the Do-Re-Mi,” investigates recurring musical patterns as sites of communication as well as units of structure.

"I examine one brief musical pattern, the Do-Re-Mi, in the works of Haydn, Beethoven, and Bruckner. By positioning the use and reception of the Do-Re-Mi in its 18th and 19th century contexts, I understand its musical ascent as signifying a rich network of meanings that includes sunrise, the sublime, and religious devotion," Slattery said.

Slattery holds a Bachelor of Music in music theory and a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from Northwestern. His work as an undergraduate included a project funded by the Office of Undergraduate Research on sacred quotations and topical content in the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, as well as a senior thesis on virtual agency in the Mozart Clarinet Quintet. He is affiliated with the Critical Theory Cluster at Northwestern.