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 2024: a suite for oboe and piano, commissioned by oboist Emily Hart, to be performed in her DMA lecture-recital at Eastman; a performance of my Sonata for Piano Duet by Elizabeth Crecca and Daniel Kuehler in a recital at Bucknell University; and two premieres, a string quartet and a suite for two pianos, to be performed at a concert of works by me and Octavio Vazquez at Nazareth College.

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