Tuomas Eerola – Professor of Music Cognition, Durham University, UK.

My institutional homepage can be found at Durham University and I am co-director of Music and Science Lab. I have served in a number of leadership positions such as Head of Department, Director of Research, and Director of Postgraduate Studies. My Academic CV is available here, and headshots are available here and here.

Music Emotion Recognition

In this area, called Music Emotion Recognition (MER), researchers typically use machine-learning to train computers to detect emotional patterns in music. Here I summarise the results of a recent meta-analysis that looked at all relevant studies from the last 10 years. The results suggested general success in predicting easy targets such as arousal and emotion categories, but improvements to the scope of the studies were also proposed.

Why Context Matters in Music and Emotions

In our research, we try to capture this idea by focusing on emotional episodes with music, which is a term that describes the situations in which music is used in everyday life. To better understand how music creates emotional experiences, we developed what we call the episode model (Eerola et al., 2025). The key idea is simple – the situation, function, and context of listening are the primary drivers of musical experience, rather than the acoustic features of the music alone.

Metascience of Music Psychology

I have advocated transparency in scholarship since the early 2000s, including sharing computer code, stimulus sets, and behavioural data. Since 2011, the replicability crisis has affected psychology—especially social psychology—and music psychology is also implicated.

Transparency in Music Psychology

I recently published a paper suggesting that music psychology, as a discipline, lacks transparency (Eerola, 2024). This claim was based on a straightforward tally of transparency- and reproducibility-related practices in articles published between 2017 and 2022 in a selection of discipline-specific journals. This suggested that only a small fraction of studies share the data, and other forms of transparency (availability of the protocols, replications, study preregistrations) is not common.

Why Music and Science?

I had several options for the title of the book. It could have been *A Guide to Empirical Musicology* or *Empirical Music Research* (as part of the title suggests). Alternatively, it might have incorporated terms like *Systematic Musicology*, *Music Cognition*, *Guide to Music Psychology* or *Scientific Musicology*. However, I chose to highlight *music and science* for specific reasons, and in this blog post, I’d like to explain why I made this choice and share some of the motivations behind it.

Music and Science book now out

I’m thrilled to announce the release of my new textbook in the fields of music and science and music psychology. My book, titled Music and Science - A Guide to Empirical Research, accumulates a decade of experience of teaching these subjects at Durham University. Over the past five years, both undergraduate and postgraduate students have accessed earlier drafts, and their invaluable feedback has shaped the book’s content and tone.

Music and Sadness?

The experience of sadness when listening to music is a fascinating puzzle. It consists of seemingly conflicting emotional experiences –- sad music may induce a range of positive emotions in some listeners, even though sadness as an emotion is considered to be negative. This paradox of enjoying negative emotions has parallels in all arts (tragedies literature, theatre, and films) and one can also think of other negative emotions such as fear which can be enjoyable in a safe context (e.g., horror films).

Preregistering Studies in Music Psychology

We are proud to announce the publication of the first Registered Report in Music Perception with our paper titled Valenced Priming with Acquired Affective Concepts in Music – Automatic Reactions to Common Tonal Chords. A Registered Report is a special type of publication format that takes the open science requirements to the maximum level; a detailed research plan is subjected to peer review before any data is collected.

Music and Emotions

Music and emotion research is a multidisciplinary field that explores the complex relationship between music and human emotions. I have explored six themes of interest in this area, namely (i) perception, (ii) induction, and (iii) cultural differences of emotions associated with music, and (iv) theories of emotions, (v) how special emotional experiences are generated, and (vi) computational models of emotions in music.

Computational Models

Computational music research is a field that combines psychology, music theory, and computer science to study various aspects of music, such as perception and cognition of music. In this short blog I talk about the way I have used models to test ideas, theories and concepts in music perception.

Examining a PhD Thesis

We try to give advice to our doctoral students about how to prepare for the PhD examination. These instructions (link), training events (link), and mock examinations are useful orientations for the pinnacle of doctoral students’ careers, but describing the process from the other side of the table, from the examiner’s point of view, is what I attempt to do here. I will draw on my twenty or so examinations in European countries (UK and Scandinavia, some in the US) related to empirical projects in music and science to reflect what seems to be essential in this review task.

The first Woman Awarded PhD at Durham Was a Music Psychologist

In 1936, Clara Robertson, who was 28 years old at the time, was the first woman to defend her doctoral thesis at Durham University. The title boldly stated The psychology of musical appreciation - an analysis of the bases and nature of the experience of listening to music, and her examiners, Dr C. S. Myers and Mr P. A. Scholes, were eminent scholars from London. The topic would have been a relevant research area sixty to eighty years later, but in the thirties, only a handful of scholars had tackled anything that could be regarded as related to this topic.

Open Data in Music Psychology

We have all heard about the replication crisis in psychology. It is not that the research ideas or methods themselves are flakey but selective analysis and reporting as well as insufficient details are making the past findings difficult to replicate. There have been several proposals aimed to mitigate this problem such as pre-registering studies beforehand and altering the statistical principles, but perhaps the simplest solution is to share data. This blog discusses the open data in music psychology.

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