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.
Computational models can help us to express our ideas about musical processes in a precise way that offers precise ways to test and explore these ideas. I have explored how we perceive melodies, especially melodic expectations (Eerola et al., 2009), emotions expressed by music (Saari et al., 2015), perception of consonance and dissonance (Eerola & Lahdelma, 2022), and rhythm and entrainment (Eerola et a., 2018) with computational models.
One fascinating aspect of computational models is to apply them to a collection of music to discover the typical structures such as metric patterns (Toiviainen & Eerola, 2006) or to find out how melodies have evolved across the time of their use (Street et al., 2022).
I have released a number of computational tools and models to facilitate the computational analysis of music.
- MIDI toolbox (Eerola & Toiviainen, 2003)
- MIR toolbox (Lartillot et al., 2008)
- Computational models of simultaneous consonance (Eerola, 2021)
- Onset synchrony calculation (Eerola & Clayton, 2024)
You can find most of the data that I have published over the last 5 years openly available, see https://github.com/tuomaseerola/opendata.