David Huron

I am an empirical musicologist, which means that my professional life has focused on trying to understand music from a scientific perspective. For two decades I was head of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory in the School of Music at the Ohio State University. In conjunction with my students and collaborators, we've conducted a wide range of scientific studies examining many aspects of music. Our work has involved behavioral experiments, endocrine studies, music analyses, fieldwork in non-western cultures, and computational corpus studies. In addition to studies of western art and popular musics, my research has included studies examining music from dozens of non-western cultures. Among other distinctions, I've been the Astor Lecturer at Oxford, the Donald Wort Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, the Ernest Bloch Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Nico Fridja Honorary Chair in Cognitive Science at the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Center. I'm grateful to have received a number of awards over the course of my career, including lifetime achievement awards, presidential, publication, and Fulbright awards.