News

Many congratulations to Katelyn Emerson for her recent article in Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval entitled 'Multimodal datasets for studying expert performances of musical scores'! This article comes from Katelyn's ongoing PhD research into the multimodal study of organ performance. Multimodal datasets are …

The 2026 SEMPRE PGR/ECR Conference will take place on 16 April 2026 at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge.It will be hosted by the Centre for Music and Science (University of Cambridge) and the Music, Mind and Brain group (Goldsmiths College, University of London).The remit of the conference is music psychology and music education; we in…

We're really proud of Harin Lee for winning best student paper award at ISMIR 2025! The paper is entitled "GlobalMood: A cross-cultural benchmark for music emotion recognition", and presents a methodology for automatically collecting music emotion descriptors across diverse languages. Harin will be joining us later this year as a King's College Jun…

The 2026 SEMPRE PGR/ECR Conference will be held on Thursday 16th April 2026 for postgraduate and early career researchers (PGRs/ECRs) in the fields of music psychology and music education. It will be jointly hosted by the Centre for Music and Science (University of Cambridge) and the Music, Mind and Brain group (Goldsmiths College, University of Lo…

Many congratulations to Isaac Sebenius for winning the Best Poster award at the 2025 Centre for Human Inspired Artificial Intelligence Conference! Isaac has been working with us this summer on this project, called "Cognitive Benchmarking of Symbolic Music Foundation Models". 

We are very pleased to hear that Maddie Jones, who did an undergraduate dissertation project at the CMS analysing the relationship between music listening and mood, has been awarded a full PhD scholarship to study at Bristol University, in the School of Psychological Science. She will be supervised by Professor Claire Haworth and Dr Oliver Davis, w…

Many congratulations to Hannah Wilkie for her recent article in Music Perception entitled 'Reverberation time and musical emotion in recorded music listening'! This article came from Hannah's MPhil thesis at the CMS in 2023. Hannah is now studying for a PhD in Princeton University.Abstract: The influence of room acoustic parameters on musical emoti…

We are very pleased to share that Nicky Swett, CMS PhD student, has successfully defended his PhD thesis titled 'Functional Analogies: Hans Keller’s Wordless Functional Analysis as a Theory of Musical Comparison'. This work investigates Hans Keller's innovative 15 Functional Analyses from the perspective of cognitive psychology, seeking to understa…

We are excited to share our new paper appearing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, entitled “Rhythmic Qualities of Jazz Improvisation Predict Performer Identity and Style in Source-Separated Audio Recordings”. This was completed by Huw Cheston during his PhD at the CMS, and builds from two earlier publications appearing both in Transactions…

Our new paper entitled “Jazz Trio Database: Automated Annotation of Jazz Piano Trio Recordings Processed Using Audio Source Separation” is just published in Transactions of the International Society of Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR). This paper arises from work completed by Huw Cheston during his PhD at the CMS, in collaboration with Joshua S…

Our new paper entitled “Trade-offs in Coordination Strategies for Duet Jazz Performances Subject to Network Delay and Jitter” has just been published in Music Perception. This paper arises from work completed by Huw Cheston during the early stages of his PhD at the CMS, and was funded by an award from Cambridge Digital Humanities.As musicians turne…

Our new paper entitled 'Consonance in the carillon' has just been published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. This paper grew out of an undergraduate dissertation by James MacConnachie. Well done James!The paper explores an interesting phenomenon whereby the idiosyncratic frequency spectrum of the carillon bell alters the usual h…

Many congratulations to David Greatrex and Sarah Hawkins for their just-published paper, 'Rhythmic variance influences the speed but not the accuracy of complex averaging decisions', published in the journal 'Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics'. This paper stems from David's PhD research at the CMS (2013-2018); David is now the head of reusable…

Harriet Edwards, recent undergraduate music and science student, has curated a library exhibition entitled 'Music and Science: Exploring the Scientific Principles Behind Musical Phenomena'. This exhibition is currently on display at the John's College Library, and has an online version available at this link. Do have a look if you are interested in…

Tacit Engagement in the Digital Age (TEDA) 2024 continues the discussion from the 2019 conference that was co-hosted by the Centre for Music and Science and CRASSH Re-Network and international Polanyi Society, sponsored by the AI & Society Journal (Springer). The 2024 conference will take place in Cambridge over 2 days on 19th and 20th September an…