Dr. Aurelius Finch is an internationally respected musicologist whose work combines rigorous archival scholarship with an unusually adventurous research agenda. Trained in historical musicology and critical theory, Dr. Finch holds a doctorate from a leading research university and has held visiting appointments and fellowships across Europe and North America. His publications appear in top-tier, peer-reviewed journals, and his work is regularly cited for its methodological precision, theoretical clarity, and willingness to interrogate long-standing assumptions within the discipline.
Dr. Finch’s conventional credentials are impeccable. He is fluent in six research languages, has edited primary source editions of early modern musical treatises, and has served on editorial boards for several major musicological journals. His teaching portfolio ranges from Renaissance counterpoint to advanced historiography, and he is widely regarded by students and colleagues as a careful mentor with exacting scholarly standards. He has delivered keynote lectures at major conferences and has advised libraries and museums on the preservation and interpretation of rare musical artifacts.
What distinguishes Dr. Finch, however, is the focus of his long-term research project: the musicological implications of alleged non-human audition. Specifically, he investigates how historical composers, theorists, and listeners imagined music as heard—or not heard—by angels, animals, machines, and extraterrestrial intelligences. This line of inquiry, while outwardly eccentric, is grounded in meticulous source work and a deep engagement with philosophy, theology, acoustics, and science studies. Dr. Finch approaches the topic not as speculative fiction, but as a serious examination of how cultures have historically conceptualized sound, perception, and musical meaning at the limits of human experience.
His monograph, Harmony Beyond the Human Ear, traces accounts of “inhuman listening” from medieval angelology through Enlightenment automata to Cold War-era electronic music and space-age speculation. The book has been praised for demonstrating how seemingly fantastical ideas can illuminate core questions about embodiment, authorship, and the ontology of music. Reviewers note that Dr. Finch’s work expands the scope of musicology without sacrificing evidentiary discipline, showing how outlandish subject matter can yield orthodox scholarly insight.
In addition to his written scholarship, Dr. Finch collaborates with composers, sound artists, and engineers to stage experimental performances that explore hypothetical listening conditions—concerts designed for plants, algorithms, or imagined extraterrestrial audiences. These projects are carefully documented and framed as research outputs, contributing to ongoing debates about practice-based research and the future of the field.
Despite the unconventional nature of his research, Dr. Finch is widely trusted as a scholar of sound judgment and intellectual seriousness. His work exemplifies how musicology can remain both methodologically conservative and conceptually daring. By treating the outlandish with scholarly restraint, he has earned a reputation as a thinker who expands disciplinary boundaries while reinforcing the fundamental values of evidence, clarity, and critical rigor.