Skip navigation
Home David Temperley

David Temperley

David Temperley is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, and the author of The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures (MIT Press, 2001).

Titles by This Author

Music and Probability

By David Temperley

In Music and Probability, David Temperley explores issues in music perception and cognition from a probabilistic perspective. The application of probabilistic ideas to music has been pursued only sporadically over the past four decades, but the time is ripe, Temperley argues, for a reconsideration of how probabilities shape music perception and even music itself.

The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures

By David Temperley

In this book, David Temperley addresses a fundamental question about music cognition: how do we extract basic kinds of musical information, such as meter, phrase structure, counterpoint, pitch spelling, harmony, and key from music as we hear it? Taking a computational approach, Temperley develops models for generating these aspects of musical structure. The models he proposes are based on preference rules, which are criteria for evaluating a possible structural analysis of a piece of music.