background

From July 2018 to May 2019 I was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, USA.

From August 2016 to May 2018 I was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Lehigh University, also PA, USA.

From June 2014 to May 2016 I was an early career research fellow in the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, Faculty of Technology, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

From January 2013 to May 2014 I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computational Perception, headed by Gerhard Widmer, at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.

From October 2011 to December 2012 I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Janata Lab at the Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis, California, USA. Petr Janata and I worked on cognition of tonality, and other aspects of musical expectancy.

I undertook my doctoral work from 2008-2011 at the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. My PhD, titled Improved methods for pattern discovery in music, with applications in automated stylistic composition, was supervised by Robin Laney, Alistair Willis, and Paul Garthwaite.

In 2007-8 I was supervised by Stephen Roberts and Charles Fox, as I worked on expounding and applying David Lewin's Generalized Interval System [1].

This was a final-year project for my 2nd BA in Mathematics and Statistics at Keble College, Oxford, where I was tutored by Robin Wilson [2, 3], Gesine Reinert and Jan Grabowski.

My 1st BA was in Music, from Robinson College, Cambridge, 2002-5. During this period I wrote a dissertation on a numeric theory of dissonance [4, 5], with a novel implementation for audio. My supervisor for this dissertation was Thomas Stainsby, with advice from Ian Cross and Nick Collins.

I also wrote a dissertation on a South African guitar style called maskanda, supervised by Lara Allen, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. This work was published with help from Christine Lucia and Katherine Butler Brown.

My Director of Studies at Robinson College was Jeremy Thurlow, and I studied composition with Robin Holloway and Alejandro Vinao.

Before university, I attended Frensham Heights School. Edwin Rolles, Shelagh Harris and Ariadne Blyth taught me music, and Dee Butler and Paul Baker taught me mathematics.

My Erdös number is 4 (Gerhard Widmer -> John Shawe-Taylor -> Chris Godsil -> Paul Erdös).

references

Here are a few books/papers I read early on in my exploration of music, computing, and psychology.

1. David Lewin. Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. (Originally published 1987 by Yale University Press.)

2. John Fauvel, Raymond Flood and Robin J. Wilson (Eds). Music and Mathematics: from Pythagoras to Fractals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

3. Robin J. Wilson. Introduction to Graph Theory, 4th ed. Harlow: Longman, 1996.

4. R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt. Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 38:548-560, 1965.

5. W. Hutchinson and L. Knopoff. The Acoustic Component of Western Consonance. Interface, 7:1-29, 1978.