Alan Marsden

Alan Marsden is a Professor of Computational Musicology at Lancaster University's Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA), part of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He has been at Lancaster since 1999, initially as a Senior Lecturer and later promoted to Professor. From 2004 to 2021, he served as Editor of the Journal of New Music Research, a leading journal in scientific and technological music studies.

Education:

• B.A. in Music, Southampton University (1981)
• Ph.D. in Music (Analysing Music as Listeners' Cognitive Activity: A Study with Reference to Mozart), Cambridge University (1987)

Research Interests: Focuses on computational approaches to music, including Schenkerian analysis software development, information theory applications in arts, and music information retrieval. His work bridges music theory, computer science, and cognitive modeling. Recently, he has extended computational techniques to visual art analysis using information theory.

Grants & Projects:

• BRIDGE Fellowship: Probabilistic parsing of music (2017)
• Transforming Musicology (2013–2017)
• Optical Music Recognition from Multiple Sources (2014–2015)

Teaching: Teaches courses on perception and the arts, psychology of music, and sound synthesis at Lancaster University. Previously taught music theory, Schenkerian analysis, and computer programming (C, PD).

Software Contributions: Developed tools like Schenker for automated analysis, Novagen for melodic generation, and Timing and Temporal Logic modules for music structure representation.

Affiliations: Involved with LICA's research groups, including Cultures DSI - Society Insight Practices. Collaborates internationally in music informatics and computational musicology.