About Michael

Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert works at the intersection of computation, A.I., and music, especially music theory and encoding. Until 2024 Cuthbert was a professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). (email)

Cuthbert is the co-founder and inventor of Artusi, the market leader for teaching of music theory and aural skills online.

Cuthbert received his A.B. summa cum laude, A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. He spent 2004-05 at the American Academy as a Rome Prize winner in Medieval Studies, 2009-10 as Fellow at Harvard's Villa I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, and in 2012–13 was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute in 2012-13. Prior to coming to MIT, Cuthbert was Visiting Assistant Professor on the faculties of Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges. His teaching included computational music theory and analysis, early music, music since 1900, quantitative and statistical musicology, and music theory.

Cuthbert has worked extensively on computer-aided musical analysis, fourteenth-century music, and the music of the past forty years. He is creator and principal investigator of music21. He has lectured and published on fragments and palimpsests of the late Middle Ages, set analysis of Sub-Saharan African Rhythm, Minimalism, and the music of John Zorn.

In 2024, Myke moved to Hawaii where his wife, Dr. Elina G. Hamilton is professor of music.

Publications

Computation & A.I. with Music

“The RomanText Format: A Flexible and Standard Method for Representing Roman Numeral Analyses,” with Dmitri Tymoczko (first author), Mark Gotham, and Christopher Ariza, Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) 20 (2019).
“ Emotion Painting: Lyric, Affect, and Musical Relationships in a Large Lead-Sheet Corpus,” co-first author with Sophia H. Sun, Empirical Musicology Review 12.3–4 (2017, pub. 2018), pp. 327–48 (PDF).
Artusi: Music Theory Now, vol. 1, electronic textbook and workbooks (2024).
Artusi: Interactive Music Fundamentals, electronic textbook and workbook, with Ryaan Ahmed, Julia Cavallaro, Darren LaCour, Joel Rust, and Joseph VanderStel (December 2020).
“Improving Rhythmic Transcriptions via Probability Models Applied Post-OMR,” with Maura Church (first author), Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) 15 (2014), pp. 643–48. Oral presentation at conference.
“Interoperable Digital Musicology Research via music21 Web Applications,” lead author with Beth Hadley, Lars Johnson, and Christopher Reyes, Proceedings of the Joint CLARIN-D/DARIAH Workshop, Service-oriented Architectures (SOAs) for the Humanities: Solutions and Impacts, Digital Humanities Conference, Hamburg, Germany (July 2012).
“Feature Extraction and Machine Learning on Symbolic Music using the music21 Toolkit,” lead author with Christopher Ariza and Lisa D. Friedland, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (2011), pp. 387–92.
“Hidden Beyond MIDI’s Reach: Feature Extraction and Machine Learning with Rich Symbolic Formats in music21,” lead author with Christopher Ariza, Jose Cabal-Ugaz, Beth Hadley, and Neena Parikh, Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, Music and Machine Learning Workshop 4 (2011).
“Score Following from Inaccurate Score and Audio Data using OMR and music21,” with Jordi Bartolomé Guillen (first author), Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, Music and Machine Learning Workshop 4 (2011).
“The music21 Stream: A New Object Model for Representing, Filtering, and Transforming Symbolic Musical Structures,” with Christopher Ariza[*], Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (2011), pp. 61–68.
“Analytical and Compositional Applications of a Network-Based Scale Model in music21,” with Christopher Ariza (first author), Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (2011), pp. 701–8.
“music21: A Toolkit for Computer-Aided Musicology and Symbolic Music Data,” lead author with Christopher Ariza, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (2010), pp. 637–42. Oral presentation at conference.
“Modeling Beats, Accents, Beams, and Time Signatures Hierarchically with music21 Meter Objects,” with Christopher Ariza (first author), Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (2010), pp. 216–23.

Other (Music) Publications

“Two ‘Textless’ Elaborations of Chant from the Ivrea Codex,” in Manuscripts, Music, Machaut: Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp, edited by Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Benjamin L. Albritton (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 485–95.
Foreword to The Textless Works of the Prague Manuscript, CZ-Pu XI E 9, edited by Jos Haring and Kees Boeke (Arezzo: Olive Music, 2021).
“Melodic Searching and the Anonymous Unica of San Lorenzo 2211,” in The End of the Ars Nova in Italy, edited by Antonio Calvia et al. (Florence: Sismel, 2020), pp. 151–61.
“Trecento I: Secular Music” and “Trecento II: Sacred Music and Motets in Italy and the East from 1300 until the End of the Schism,” chapters 35 and 36 in Cambridge History of Medieval Music, edited by Mark Everist and Thomas Forrest Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1079–1124.
“Identificazioni di composizioni vocali italiane e internazionali in alcuni manoscritti liturgici del tardo Trecento,” Rivista internazionale di Musica Sacra 37.1–2 (December 2016), pp. 219–27; with Nicola Tangari.
“Difference, Disability, and Composition in the Late Middle Ages: Of Antonio ‘Zachara’ da Teramo and Francesco ‘Il Cieco’ da Firenze,” chapter 26 in Oxford [University Press] Handbook of Music & Disability Studies, edited by Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph Straus (2015), pp. 517–28.
“Music,” chapter 26 in Dante in Context, part of the Cambridge [University Press] Works of Dante series, edited by Lino Pertile and Zyg Baranski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 448–57.
“Church Polyphony apropos of some Old Fragments in Rome,” L’ars nova italiana del Trecento 8 (2014), pp. 167–81.
“A Postscript to the Montefortino Fragment with Transcriptions,” L’ars nova italiana del Trecento 8 (2014), pp. 449–60.
City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music, in honor of Thomas Forrest Kelly, edited with Sean Gallagher and Christoph Wolff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Music Department, 2013). Reviews: Kate Helsen, Plainsong and Medieval Music 23.2 (2014), pp. 256–59; Chadwick Jenkins, Notes (2015), pp. 525–27; William Flynn, Music & Letters 96.4 (2015), pp. 642–44.
“Changing Musical Time at the Beginning of the Renaissance (and Today),” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, edited by Louis A. Waldman and Machtelt Israëls (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), vol. 2, pp. 572–80 + 699.
“Monks, Manuscripts, and Other Peer-to-Peer Song Sharing Networks of the Middle Ages,” in Cantus scriptus: Technologies of Medieval Song, 3rd Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, edited by Lynn Ransom (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2012), pp. 101–23.
“International Style and Medieval Italian Music: A Flemish Motet in the Ascoli Piceno/Montefortino Fragment,” with Sasha Zamler-Carhart, in Fama e publica vox nel Medioevo: Atti del Convegno di Studio…Ascoli Piceno, Palazzo dei Capitani, 3–5 December 2009, edited by Isa Lori Sanfilippo and Antonio Rigon (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 2011), pp. 213–27.
“Groups and Projects among the Paduan polyphonic sources,” in I frammenti musicali padovani tra Santa Giustina e la diffusione della musica in Europa, edited by Francesco Facchin and Pietro Gnan (Padua, 2011), pp. 183–214.
“The Nuremberg and Melk Fragments and the International Ars Nova,” Studi Musicali nuova serie 1, no. 1 (2010) [i.e., 2011], pp. 7–51.
The Soul of Wit: Microfestschrift Rob Wegman zum 50. Geburtstag. Editor of the book. Also contributor of an article, “Polyphony and its Absence in the Incunabula of the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence (with some Mann thrown in for good measure)” (2011), 86 pp.
“Style, Locality, and the Trecento Gloria: New Sources and a Reexamination,” with Elizabeth Nyikos, Acta Musicologica 82 (2010), pp. 185–212.
“Tipping the Iceberg: Missing Italian Polyphony from the Age of Schism,” Musica Disciplina 54 (2009), pp. 39–74.
Bologna Q15: The Making and Remaking of a Musical Manuscript by Margaret Bent, review for Notes 66.3 (March 2010), pp. 656–60.
Ars nova: French and Italian Music in the Fourteenth Century, edited with John L. Nádas (Music in the Medieval World Reference Series, vol. 6) (London: Ashgate, 2009). Reviewed by Gary Towne, The Medieval Review (February 2010).
“Palimpsests, Sketches, and Extracts: The Organization and Compositions of Seville 5-2-25,” L’ars nova italiana del Trecento 7 (2009), pp. 57–78.
Der Mensural Codex St. Emmeram: Faksimile der Handschrift Clm 14274 der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München by Ian Rumbold and Peter Wright, review for Notes 65.4 (June 2009), pp. 252–54 (erratum December 2009).
“A New Trecento Source of a French Ballade (Je voy mon cuer),” in Golden Muse: The Loeb Music Library at 50, Harvard Library Bulletin, new series 18 (2008), pp. 77–81.
“Esperance and the French Song in Foreign Sources,” Studi Musicali 36.1 (2007), pp. 1–19.
“Generalized Set Analysis and Sub-Saharan African Rhythm? Evaluating and Expanding the Theories of Willie Anku,” Journal of New Music Research (formerly Interface) 35.3 (2006), pp. 211–19.
“Zacara’s D’amor Languire and Strategies for Borrowing in the Early Fifteenth-Century Italian Mass,” in Antonio Zacara da Teramo e il suo tempo, edited by Francesco Zimei (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2004), pp. 337–57 and plates 10–13.
“Free Improvisation: John Zorn and the Construction of Jewish Identity through Music,” in Studies in Jewish Musical Traditions, edited by Kay Kaufman Shelemay (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard College Library, 2001), pp. 1–31.
“Original Sources: Manuscript and Printed,” with Jennifer G. Lee, in Johann Sebastian Bach, ‘The Man from Whom All True Musical Wisdom Proceeded’: A 250th Anniversary Exhibition, edited by Christoph Wolff (Cambridge, Mass.: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2000).