[5] Emily has an interest in zoomusicology (the study of animal and human song) and the natural world.
She has explored this in a number of works, her doctoral dissertation at Princeton and as a part of interdisciplinary birdsong research conducted alongside biologists and ornithologists.
Together with cognitive biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch, Bruno Gingras and Dominik Endres, she discovered that hermit thrush song follows the overtone series.
Her chamber opera Jan Tait and the Bear was awarded a 2016 Opera America Discovery Grant[8] and was selected for performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of the 2018 Made in Scotland Showcase.
[9] Her work has received numerous awards, including the 2012 Theodore Front Prize[10] for A Short, Slow Life, two ASCAP Morton Gold Awards, the Joseph H. Bearns Prize, and the Sorel Organization Medallion in Recording.