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Stephen S. Hudson is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at ��������, after previously teaching at Northwestern University (where he received a PhD in Music Theory & Cognition) and the University of Richmond. He is an emerging expert on metal music, focusing on fans and musicians’ embodied experiences of rhythm, timbre, and song form. Prof. Hudson also has a secondary research agenda exploring multilayered harmony in R&B and advanced pop music, using tools from jazz theory.

Student Research Opportunities

Prof. Hudson is an enthusiastic collaborator with student co-authors. These projects typically start as either a Summer Research Program proposal, or a Directed Research class during the year. Recent and on-going projects include:

• Analyzing multi-layered harmonies with jazz theory: In addition to a new article co-authored with �������� graduate James Wang (see below), I’m also currently working on a project with 3 music majors exploring complex, chromatic uses of the F/G sonority in jazz fusion, progressive R&B, and advanced pop styles.
• Hybrids between EDM and pop song forms: Quite a few scholars have written about a new development circa 2010 in which pop songs add an EDM-style “drop” after the chorus. I’m working with students to place these recent developments in a broader context. One study of Eurodance songs 1990-2010, co-authored with Compton French (another recent �������� graduate) is currently under review at a journal. I’m currently working on a new stage in this project about Indietronica, with Liam Sampson.
• Copyright and forensic musicology: While I’ve taught about copyright for a long time, I’m now for the first time engaging in research on this topic, with an �������� student coauthor, Anna Miller. We are using concepts from statistical theory to propose a more sophisticated mathematical framework for existing practices of investigating music copyright infringement. More details coming soon!

Courses I Teach

MUSC 251 — Music Theory III: Chromatic Harmony includes a unique unit on jazz theory applied to R&B and other advanced pop music, which is based on my emerging research and includes ideas that are literally not taught anywhere else!

MUSC 351 — Music Theory IV: Form and Time explores various traditions of musical form and conceptions of musical time across several of the world’s cultures. It includes a unit based on my ongoing research into drum patterns and song form in metal and EDM styles.

MUSC 105 — Topics in American Music: Punk and Metal is a survey of history and styles of Punk and Metal music, with a particular focus on American bands and how they have intersected with the history of American demographic, economic, and political issues

MUSC 117 — Copyright, Originality, and Theft in American Popular Music explores how ideas about musical copyright, originality, authenticity, property, imitation, appropriation, and theft have evolved over the history of the American popular music industry. 

Research

My first book, titled , was published in 2026 by Oxford University Press. This book investigates the origins and nature of heaviness, defined as an experience of embodied impact, and uses heaviness as a lens to understand the history of the metal genre. It overturns conventional thinking about how the genre “left the blues behind” by showing how much of the genre’s ideology and direction of later development was shaped by the highly racialized conditions of its emergence from the blues in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Here are a few additional publications:

• 2021. “” documents the most common conventional song form in metal music and explores artists’ individual strategies for variation within this convention.
• 2022. “” argues that headbangers coordinate with drum patterns to create their own experience of beat, which can be more irregular and variable than traditional theories of meter would lead one to believe.
• 2023. “” introduces theories of song form to a general audience of metal scholars, showing how in some songs the narrative described in the lyrics seems to be “acted out” by the shape of the song form.
• 2023. “” uses basic concepts from jazz theory to show how Drake’s multi-layered harmonies afford complex and ambiguous hearings of chord identity, which seem to reflect the conflicted feelings of his songs’ lyrics.
• 2025. “” argues that pedal tones often participate in the harmonies around them, and defines two new categories, the “sentimental pedal” and the “cinematic pedal”—and was co-authored with an �������� student, Jiayi (James) Wang.