email: t.cochrane@qub.ac.uk

Tel: 028 9097 5415

Location: SARC, 2017

I got my BA in philosophy from UCL in 1999.

I got my MA in music composition from Birmingham Conservatoire in 2001. I am mostly interested in improvisation and electro-acoustic composition. I've put some of my compositions here http://soundcloud.com/tomcochrane

In June 2007, I got my Phd from Nottingham University for a thesis entitled 'Shared Emotions in Music' supervised by Greg Currie. Some collective musical improvisations were submitted along with it. I intend to publish a revised version of this as a book in a couple of years. Meanwhile the thesis can be downloaded here: http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/286/

From September 2007 to September 2010 I was a postdoc at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, which is an institute specializing in emotion research at the University of Geneva. Here I researched emotions, the sublime, character, the relation between aesthetics and emotions, and more on music. I intend to publish a book collecting together my various articles on emotions at some point- so far I've completed 5 out of a projected 10.

From May 2010 until September 2010 I worked on an EU FP7 technologies project called SIEMPRE (Social Interaction and Entrainment using Music PeRformance Experimentation). This is a very big 3 year project that I helped to apply for in collaboration with InfoMus lab, University of Genoa, University Pompeu Fabre, Barcelona, Queen's University Belfast, the Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Geneva. The project aims to investigate emotional entrainment between performers, audience and conductors during musical performance using all kinds of bodily and behavioural measures. I will continue to be an associate with this project after September 2010.

In September 2010 I started an individual project at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at QUB, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. This project is called 'The Mood Organ: Putting theories of musical expression into practice' and is aimed at generating music automatically using physiological and behavioural signals that will match the emotional state of the subject. This is a practical music technology project and is geared towards the same ideal of sharing emotions in music that I outlined in my PhD.

I'm also planning various other philosophical works including a short book on the fear of death (philosophical self-help!) a book on patterns and complexity (an abiding interest of mine), some philosophical fiction, plus musical compositions to express different emotions and patterns.