Header Image - David Temperley

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

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’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.

As a composer, I’ve written mainly piano music, chamber music (string quartets and other pieces for small ensembles), and songs.

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