David Temperley

David Temperley

  • Associate Professor of Music Theory

PhD, Columbia University

Office Location
409 ESM - Annex
Fax
(585) 274-1557

Short Biography

David Temperley is associate professor of music theory at Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, USA. He received his PhD from Columbia University, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Ohio State University, and has been at Eastman since 2000. Temperley's primary research area is computational modeling of music cognition; he has explored issues such as meter perception, key perception, harmonic analysis, stream segregation, and transcription. His first book, The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures (MIT, 2001) won the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award; his second book, Music and Probability (MIT, 2007) explores computational music cognition from a probabilistic perspective. Other research has focused on harmony in rock, rhythm in traditional African music, and hypermeter in common-practice music. Temperley has also worked on a variety of linguistic issues, including parsing, syntactic choice, and linguistic rhythm; he is co-inventor of the Link Grammar Parser, a widely used syntactic parser of English.