Header Image - David Temperley

I’m a composer, music theorist, and cognitive scientist. At this site you can listen to my compositions, learn about my research, and download my papers.

As a composer, I’ve written mainly piano music, chamber music, and songs. Some compositions/performances in 2023 include: a sonata for horn and piano, commissioned by Peter Kurau (Eastman faculty and principal hornist of the RPO); a suite for flute and cello, commissioned by the American Wild Ensemble; a suite for oboe and piano, commissioned by oboist Emily Hart; and a new set of 12 preludes for piano, premiered by me at the “Music, Math, and Language” workshop in Seoul.

As a researcher, I’m interested in the way people perceive, process, and mentally represent music, and the possibility of learning about this through computational modeling. I’m also interested in corpus analysis (statistical analysis of music) and what it can tell us about musical styles and broader issues of music cognition. I’ve worked a lot on popular music, emotion in music, and issues of rhythm and meter. I have a strong secondary interest in language research: parsing, sentence production / comprehension, and corpus research.

An article in City Newspaper about my music / A radio interview on WXXI