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 upcoming performances of my works in early 2025: Emily Hart and I will play my Suite for Oboe and Piano at the University of Florida on Feb. 4; Nash Ryder and Sean Botkin will play my violin sonata no. 3 at the U of Northern Iowa’s New Music Festival (Feb. 26–March 1); and Elizabeth Crecca and Daniel Kuehler will play my Sonata for Piano Duet at Rochester Institute of Technology on March 4.

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