Peter Harrison | Centre for Music and Science

I am an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music, Director of the Centre for Music and Science, and Director of Studies in Music at Churchill College. Previously I worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and as a data science consultant for the music research startup SoundOut.

I specialise in computational approaches to music psychology; my research interests include music cognition, empirical music analysis, empirical performance studies, individual differences in music psychology, music learning aids, and software for behavioural experiments.

I am an Associate Editor for the journal Music Perception.

I teach BA and MPhil courses in Music & Science within the Faculty of Music.

Projects

Selected Publications

Frank, J., & Harrison, P. M. C. Modeling individual differences in chord pleasantness judgments Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (2026)
Tan, C., & Harrison, P. M. C. What music do people use for mood regulation? Psychology of Music (Forthcoming)
Whyatt, D. M., & Harrison, P. M. C. melody-features: A Python Package for Symbolic Melody Analysis Conference: Digital Music Research Network 20 (2025)
Cheston, H., Bance, R., & Harrison, P. M. C. Deconstructing jazz piano style using machine learning arXiv (2025)
Jimenez, I., Kuusi, T., Ojala, J., Czedik-Eysenberg, I., Harrison, P. M. C., & Chander, A. Effect of timbre on Goodness-of-Fit ratings of short chord sequences Music Perception (2025)
Lee, H., Çelen, E., Harrison, P. M. C., Anglada-Tort, M., van Rijn, P., Park, M., Schönwiesner, M., & Jacoby, N. GlobalMood: A cross-cultural benchmark for music emotion recognition International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (2025)
Tchernichovski, O., Globerson, E., Harrison, P. M. C., & Jacoby, N. How constraints on editing affects cultural evolution arXiv (2025)
Emerson, K., & Harrison, P. M. C. Multimodal datasets for studying expert performances of musical scores Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (2025)
Wilkie, H., & Harrison, P. M. C. Reverberation time and musical emotion in recorded music listening Music Perception (2025)
Jimenez, I., Kuusi, T., Ojala, J., & Harrison, P. M. C. The effect of chord duration on the relative salience of chord-type and voicing changes Psychology of Music (2025)
Cheung, V. K. M., Harrison, P. M. C., Koelsch, S., Pearce, M. T., Friederici, A. D., & Meyer, L. Cognitive and sensory expectations independently shape musical expectancy and pleasure Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences (2024)
Harrison, P. M. C., & MacConnachie, J. Consonance in the carillon Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2024)
Frank, J., Harrison, P. M. C., Ross, B., & Venter, C. Exploring the variability of musical-emotional expression over historical time Empirical Musicology Review (2024)
Cheston, H., Schlichting, J. L., Cross, I., & Harrison, P. M. C. Jazz Trio Database: Automated timing annotation of jazz piano trio recordings processed using audio source separation Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (2024)
Eitel, M., Ruth, N., Harrison, P. M. C., Frieler, K., & Müllensiefen, D. Perception of chord sequences modeled with prediction by partial matching, voice-leading distance, and spectral pitch-class similarity Music & Science (2024)
Cheston, H., Schlichting, J. L., Cross, I., & Harrison, P. M. C. Rhythmic qualities of jazz improvisation predict performer identity and style in source-separated audio recordings Royal Society Open Science (2024)
Zioga, I., Harrison, P. M. C., Pearce, M., Bhattacharya, J., & Di Bernardi Luft, C. The association between liking, learning and creativity in music Scientific Reports (2024)
Marjieh, R., Harrison, P. M. C., Lee, H., Deligiannaki, F., & Jacoby, N. Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales Nature Communications (2024)
Cheston, H., Cross, I., & Harrison, P. M. C. Trade-offs in coordination strategies for duet jazz performances subject to network delay and jitter Music Perception (2024)
Anstee, L., Müllensiefen, D., & Harrison, P. M. C. Handedness and musicality in secondary school students Music Perception (2023)
Anglada-Tort, M., Harrison, P. M. C., Lee, H., & Jacoby, N. Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution Current Biology (2023)
Sanders, S., & Harrison, P. M. C. A case study investigating the interaction between tuba acoustic radiation patterns and performance spaces Audio Engineering Society Convention 153 (2022)
Anglada-Tort, M., Harrison, P. M. C., & Jacoby, N. REPP: A robust cross-platform solution for online sensorimotor synchronization experiments Behavior Research Methods (2022)
Silas, S., Müllensiefen, D., Gelding, R., Frieler, K., & Harrison, P. M. C. The associations between music training, musical working memory, and visuospatial working memory: an opportunity for causal modeling Music Perception (2022)
van Rijn, P., Mertes, S., Schiller, D., Dura, P., Siuzdak, H., Harrison, P. M. C., André, E., & Jacoby, N. VoiceMe: Personalized voice generation in TTS Interspeech 2022 (2022)
Harrison, P. M. C., & Seale, M. Against unitary theories of music evolution Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2021)
Gelding, R. W., Harrison, P. M. C., Silas, S., Johnson, B. W., Thompson, W. F., & Müllensiefen, D. An efficient and adaptive test of auditory mental imagery Psychological Research (2021)
Rijn, P. van ., Mertes, S., Schiller, D., Harrison, P. M. C., Larrouy-Maestri, P., André, E., & Jacoby, N. Exploring emotional prototypes in a high dimensional TTS latent space Interspeech 2021 (2021)
Goldman, A., Harrison, P. M. C., Jackson, T., & Pearce, M. T. Reassessing syntax-related ERP components using popular music chord sequences: A model-based approach Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2021)
Harrison, P. M. C. Three questions concerning consonance perception Music Perception (2021)
Harrison, P. M. C., Bianco, R., Chait, M., & Pearce, M. T. PPM-Decay: A computational model of auditory prediction with memory decay PLoS Computational Biology (2020)
Harrison, P. M. C. M. C., & Pearce, M. T. A Computational Cognitive Model for the Analysis and Generation of Voice Leadings Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2020)
Zioga, I., Harrison, P. M. C., Pearce, M. T., Bhattacharya, J., & Luft, C. D. B. Auditory but not audiovisual cues lead to higher neural sensitivity to the statistical regularities of an unfamiliar musical style Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2020)
Zioga, I., Harrison, P. M. C., Pearce, M. T., Bhattacharya, J., & Di Bernardi Luft, C. From learning to creativity: Identifying the behavioural and neural correlates of learning to predict human judgements of musical creativity NeuroImage (2020)
Harrison, P. M. C., Marjieh, R., Adolfi, F., van Rijn, P., Anglada-Tort, M., Tchernichovski, O., Larrouy-Maestri, P., & Jacoby, N. Gibbs Sampling with People Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2020)
Bianco, R., Harrison, P. M. C., Hu, M., Bolger, C., Picken, S., Pearce, M. T., & Chait, M. Long-term implicit memory for sequential auditory patterns in humans eLife (2020)
Harrison, P. M. C. psychTestR: An R package for designing and conducting behavioural psychological experiments The Journal of Open Source Software (2020)
Harrison, P. M. C., & Pearce, M. T. Simultaneous consonance in music perception and composition Psychological Review (2020)
Cheung, V. K. M., Harrison, P. M. C., Meyer, L., Pearce, M. T., Haynes, J.-D., & Koelsch, S. Uncertainty and surprise jointly predict musical pleasure and amygdala, hippocampus, and auditory cortex activity Current Biology (2019)
de Fleurian, R., Harrison, P. M. C., Pearce, M. T., & Quiroga-Martinez, D. R. Reward prediction tells us less than expected about musical pleasure Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019)
Larrouy-Maestri, P., Harrison, P. M. C., & Müllensiefen, D. The mistuning perception test: A new measurement instrument Behavior Research Methods (2019)
Harrison, P. M. C., & Pearce, M. T. An energy-based generative sequence model for testing sensory theories of Western harmony Proceedings of the 19th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (2018)
Harrison, P. M. C., & Müllensiefen, D. Development and validation of the computerised adaptive beat alignment test (CA-BAT) Scientific Reports (2018)
Harrison, P. M. C., & Pearce, M. T. Dissociating sensory and cognitive theories of harmony perception through computational modeling Proceedings of ICMPC15/ESCOM10 (2018)
Harrison, P. M. C., Collins, T., & Müllensiefen, D. Applying modern psychometric techniques to melodic discrimination testing: Item response theory, computerised adaptive testing, and automatic item generation Scientific Reports (2017)
Harrison, P. M. C., Musil, J. J., & Müllensiefen, D. Modelling melodic discrimination tests: Descriptive and explanatory approaches Journal of New Music Research (2016)
Müllensiefen, D., Harrison, P. M. C., Caprini, F., & Fancourt, A. Investigating the importance of self-theories of intelligence and musicality for students' academic and musical achievement Frontiers in Psychology (2015)