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Biography
Steven M. Demorest is the Ruth Sutton Waters Endowed Professor of Music at the University of Washington where he conducts the Men's Glee Club and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in choral music methods, research methods, psychology of music, and the cognitive neuroscience of music. He is co-director of the Laboratory for Music Cognition, Culture and Learning.
Dr. Demorest's research interests include the assessment and remediation of inaccurate singing, cross-cultural musical understanding, music cognition, sight-singing pedagogy, and the application of neuroimaging techniques to music research. Demorest's recent publications include coauthoring the second edition of Choral Music Methods and Materials (Cengage, 2013) with Barbara Brinson as well as articles on comparative research in music cognition, enculturation effects on music memory, singing accuracy, sight-singing instruction, and neuroimaging studies of cross-cultural musical understanding.
Dr. Demorest has been a recent contributor to Diana Deutsch’s The Psychology of Music (3rd Edition), the Oxford Handbook of Music Education, the MENC Handbook of Research on Music Learning: Volume 1, Neurosciences and Music IV: Learning and Memory, and the 2nd Edition of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music. His scholarly work has been published in Music Perception, NeuroImage, Journal of Research in Music Education, Music Educators Journal, Council for Research in Music Education Bulletin, Psychomusicology, and the International Journal of Research on Choral Singing. Along with colleague Steven J. Morrison, his research into music and brain function has appeared in Neuroimage, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Progress in Brain Research and The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
He has served or is serving on the editorial boards of the Journal of Research in Music Education, the Music Educators Journal, Musicae Scientiae, Empirical Musicology Review, Reviews of Research in Human Learning and Music, and the International Journal of Research on Choral Singing. He currently serves on the executive committees for the Society for Research in Music Education and the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition.
A nationally known clinician, Demorest has lectured at the American Choral Directors Association National Conference, The Music Educators National Conference and at many state and regional ACDA and MENC conferences. He is the author of Building Choral Excellence: Teaching Sight-singing in the Choral Rehearsal, published by Oxford University Press, and the editor of a series of lectures by Weston Noble, Creating the Special World, published by GIA. In 2007 he received the Weston H. Noble award for outstanding contributions to choral music from Luther College, his alma mater. Demorest holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.M. in Choral Conducting from Westminster Choir College, and a B.A. in music from Luther College.