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Peter M. C. Harrison

Postdoctoral researcher

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

Biography

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Computational Auditory Perception research group at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. I’m interested in computational approaches to cognitive science, and how they might help us understand statistical cognition, auditory perception, and musical aesthetics.

Education

  • PhD in Cognitive Science, 2019

    Queen Mary, University of London

  • MSc in Music, Mind & Brain, 2015

    Goldsmiths, University of London

  • BA in Music, 2014

    University of Cambridge

Projects

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All Harmony Musical abilities Software

Consonance

incon - Modelling perceptual consonance.

Developing psychological tests

A new R framework.

hrep

hrep - Harmony representation for music cognition research.

Musical tests

A new generation of musical ability tests.

Voice leading

voicer - An R package for analysing and generating voice leadings.

Recent Publications

Peter M. C. Harrison (2021). Three questions concerning consonance perception. Music Perception.

PDF DOI

Peter M. C. Harrison, Raja Marjieh, Federico Adolfi, Pol van Rijn, Manuel Anglada-Tort, Ofer Tchernichovski, Pauline Larrouy-Maestri, Nori Jacoby (2020). Gibbs Sampling with People. 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020).

PDF

Peter M. C. Harrison, Roberta Bianco, Maria Chait, Marcus T. Pearce (2020). PPM-Decay: A computational model of auditory prediction with memory decay. PLOS Computational Biology.

PDF DOI

Ioanna Zioga, Peter M. C. Harrison, Marcus T. Pearce, Joydeep Bhattacharya, Caroline D. B. Luft (2020). Auditory but not audiovisual cues lead to higher neural sensitivity to the statistical regularities of an unfamiliar musical style. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

PDF DOI

Roberta Bianco, Peter M. C. Harrison, Mingyue Hu, Cora Bolger, Samantha Picken, Marcus T. Pearce, Maria Chait (2020). Long-term implicit memory for sequential auditory patterns in humans. eLife.

DOI

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Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Postdoctoral researcher

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

Oct 2019 – Present Frankfurt, Germany
I am based in Nori Jacoby’s research group, ‘Computational Auditory Perception’. We aim to explore how individuals from diverse backgrounds perceive sound, music, and other stimuli, and how these perceptual differences may be explained through adaptation and learning.
 
 
 
 
 

Scientific Chair

SysMus17

Jan 2017 – Aug 2018 London, UK
We hosted the 10th International Conference for Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus17) in 2017. As Scientific Chair, I was responsible for the academic side of the conference, in particular managing manuscript submission, peer reviewing, and making final decisions about manuscript acceptance.
 
 
 
 
 

Data scientist

SoundOut

Apr 2016 – Present Reading, UK
SoundOut is an automated crowdsourced prediction and validation SaaS platform capable of testing the resonance of any media type (imagery, concepts, video, audio) with any target demographic in over 35 countries. I have helped SoundOut to develop and maintain computational tools for language analysis, quality checking, and prediction generation.
 
 
 
 
 

Organ scholar

Royal Hospital Chelsea

Sep 2014 – Aug 2015 London, UK
I worked alongside the excellent professional choir at the Royal Hospital Chelsea’s weekly choral services, primarily contributing as an organist but occasionally as a conductor.

Invited talks

Consonance and timbre

Jul 23, 2021 9:00 AM — 10:30 AM The Music Lab, Harvard University

Gibbs Sampling with People

Sep 5, 2020 4:00 PM — 5:30 PM Center for Language, Music and Emotion (CLaME), Max Planck / NYU

Reward prediction: An explanation for musical pleasure?

Nov 20, 2019 1:00 PM — 2:00 PM Goldsmiths, University of London

Modelling the perception and composition of Western musical harmony

Apr 23, 2019 11:30 AM — 1:00 PM Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt

Modelling the perception and composition of Western musical harmony

Mar 5, 2019 5:00 PM — 6:00 PM Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge
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