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Overview
Affiliations
AffiliationRoom numberTelephone
Professor of Music Cognition in the Department of Music108 (49 North Bailey)+44 (0) 191 33 43151
Associate Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study  

Biography

Tuomas Eerola is Professor in Music Cognition in Durham University. He obtained his MA degree in musicology at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) in 1997. His pre-doctoral work involved periods of study at Leicester University (UK) and Cornell University (USA). In 2003, he finished his PhD at University of Jyväskylä in musicology (music cognition). In 2003-2006, he worked as postdoctoral researcher at the same institution, followed by a postdoctoral position at an EU Project (Tuning the Brain for Music). Between 2007 and 2013, he held a professorship at the the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), first associated with Music, Mind & Technology MA programme and later as a Chair of Musicology. Eerola was affiliated with the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research. At Music Department at Durham University, he has served as the Director of Research (2013-2015) and the Head of Department (2018-2020).

Professor Eerola has lead several major research projects, Sweet Sorrow funded by the Academy of Finland (2013-2017). He has been the co-investigator in Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, 2016-18), led by Martin Clayton and the other co-investigators being Antonio Camurri (Genoa) and Peter Keller (Sydney). He is currently involved in two funded research projects (EnTimeMent, funded by EU FET programme led by Antonio Camurri, and Social cohesion and resilience through intercultural music engagement, which is funded by Australian Research Council and led by Jane Davidson and Bill Thompson).

Tuomas Eerola has published more than 80 journal articles in the past 10 years (see Google Scholar or ORCID). Eerola has been the President of Finnish Musicological Society and serves on several editorial boards including the journals Psychology of Music, Empirical Musicology Review, and Psychomusicology.

To read more about music psychology at Durham, see Music & Science Lab and Music Psychology at Durham.

Research interests

  • Music and emotions
  • Music and movement
  • Music perception, particularly melody, rhythm and timbre

Publications

Chapter in book

Conference Paper

Journal Article

Supervision students