“One of my long-term missions as a musician is to help bridge what I perceive as unnecessary gaps in communication, education, and understanding between the academic and popular worlds of music. This passion involves giving music in the popular vein a space in scholarly discourse that it deserves, as well as introducing new generations of music enthusiasts to the vast history and educational value of music, which deserves attention. My belief is that anyone with a passion for this immensely important art form should be able to find the beauty, nourishment, and self-worth that I have found, in music academia and beyond. With so many avenues for the way people learn to understand and experience music today, I believe there is room to elevate and enhance our discourse, making music in all its depth and richness more accessible to everyone. My intense interests for analyzing, understanding, and explaining the mysteries of music give me a true sense of purpose in this world, and I aim to further refine these skills in order to carry out such passions.“

Selected Papers

Below is a list of selected papers Mullooly has written during his time as a graduate student in music theory:

This study attempts to investigate distinct differences in musical preference between the average music consumer and the professional music critic, and how such differences may have changed over time. The study consists of an analysis of harmonic progressions from a corpus of 120 songs across two different eras, each broken into two categories of listener preference; songs preferred by the public consumers, and songs preferred by music critics. Statistical parameters include percentage of non-diatonic harmony used, percentage of non-chord tones used, and percentage of syncopation used within the harmonic rhythm. Results showed that, in the last forty years, the tastes in harmonic complexities of those who listen to music critically have not changed a considerable amount, while tastes in harmonic complexities of the average listener have changed rather drastically.

This analysis of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s 2016 album Nonagon Infinity uses Nicole Biamonte’s (2014) model of the functions of metric and rhythmic dissonance in rock music to understand its compositional structure on a formal level. In analyzing each section’s metric and thematic properties, I argue that Nonagon Infinity takes the conventions of metric dissonance to a new scale through careful expansion and thematic development, eventually switching the roles of metric dissonance and consonance in formal function and redefining the feeling of dissonance to the listener. This works to create a sense of progression and cohesion throughout the cyclic album.

Drawing on Drew Nobile’s (2020) theory of form as harmony in rock music, as well as previous analyses by Megan Lavengood and Allen Moore regarding timbre analysis in pop and rock music, I analyze two albums by Green Day, one from the 1990’s and one from the 2000’s, in an attempt to show how the genre of punk musically changed between the two decades. I argue that Green Day’s 2004 album American Idiot was a catalyst for a new era of American punk through its more robust treatment of structural harmonies, its attention to large-scale form, its expanded uses of auxiliary formal sections, and its constant tension and release within the timbral norms to introduce a more cynical and nihilistic perspective on punk culture that reflected American sentiments post-9/11.

In this paper, I give an overview of the history of forensic musicology as an academic field and discuss the multiple different approaches scholars have taken in this specific type of music analysis. I also give my own opinions on the state of the field today and offer a more interdisciplinary approach on how forensic musicology could progress in the future.

This corpus study analyses the amount of diatonicism and chromaticism in each melodic line throughout the entirety the The Beatles’s discography in an attempt to understand the evolution of the band’s compositional style. The results show how The Beatles progressed in using melodic chromaticism to varying degrees; what started as the chromaticism being prevalent as part of the borrowed 1950s blues style became more sparse and novelty throughout their career, while also becoming more of a consistent, clear marker of their melodic writing.

This is a research project I undertook in order to devise a hypothetical experiment to test the possible relationship between mechanisms of emotional induction and the result of one’s aesthetic value judgement in music. Using Patrik Juslin’s (2013) BRECVEM model of emotional induction as a basis, I hypothesize that the strength of Juslin’s proposed mechanisms felt within any given individual is at least somewhat dependent upon one’s conscious understanding of musical structure (developed through academic musical training), and that such mechanisms where dependence on musical structure is high are more influential to those with certain musical training in the development of preference judgements.

This research paper presents a 4-level model of how the feeling of guilty pleasure is manifested and induced through music. Drawing upon emotion theory and other relevant research in music and psychology, we argue that the intensity of musical guilty pleasure correlates directly to the amount of fear, and therefore intuitive guilt, afforded by each of the four domains in the perception process. We analyze specific social scenarios to hypothesize how certain mechanisms may work to either increase or decrease the amount of guilty pleasure felt.