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Music Cognition

The Music Cognition group, led by Dr. Marcus Pearce, focuses on understanding the experience of music as a psychological phenomenon. We study all aspects of music perception and creation using a combination of methods including behavioural testing, neuroimaging and computational modelling.

Further details of the members of the team, publications, opportunities and resources are available on the Music Cognition Group webpages.

Research

Most of our current work falls into one of the following research areas.

Music Perception and Cognition: In this research, we study the way in which listeners represent and process musical structure, from low-level features of notes to high-level form. This includes study of the cognitive representations and processes involved in learning musical styles, generating expectations about music, grouping musical elements and analysing musical structure.

Empirical Aesthetics of Music: Music exists in all cultures and, in Western cultures, we spend a large proportion of our time listening to music. Why do we find music so pleasurable? Here we are interested in the psychological and neural processes involved in musical appreciation including emotion induction by music, preference and the experience of pleasure and beauty. The goal is to understand how properties of the music, the individual and context determine the nature of an aesthetic experience of music.

Psychophysics: Here, we are interested in low-level perceptual processing of acoustic features of music such as pitch, timbre, dynamics and loudness.

Members

The Music Cognition group currently includes the following members:

NameProject/interests/keywords
Ruby CrockerContinuous mood recognition in film music
Andrew (Drew) EdwardsDeep Learning for Jazz Piano: Transcription + Generative Modeling
Oluremi FalowoE-AIM - Embodied Cognition in Intelligent Musical Systems
Adam Andrew Garrow: Probabilistic learning of sequential structures in music cognition
Madeline HamiltonImproving AI-generated Music with Pleasure Models
Benjamin HayesPerceptually motivated deep learning approaches to creative sound synthesis
Tyler Howard McIntoshExpressive Performance Rendering for Music Generation Systems
Dr Marcus Pearce
Senior Lecturer in Sound & Music Processing
Music Cognition, Auditory Perception, Empirical Aesthetics, Statistical Learning, Probabilistic Modelling.
Vjosa PreniqiPredicting demographics, personalities, and global values from digital media behaviours
Dr Charalampos Saitis
Lecturer in Digital Music Processing, Turing Fellow
Communication acoustics, crossmodal correspondences, sound synthesis, cognitive audio, musical haptics
Jingjing TangEnd-to-End System Design for Music Style Transfer with Neural Networks
Ningzhi WangGenerative Models For Music Audio Representation And Understanding
Prof Geraint Wiggins
Professor of Computational Creativity
Computational Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, Music Cognition
Chris WinnardMusic Interestingness in the Brain

PhD Study - interested in joining the team? We are currently accepting PhD applications.

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