David Huron (1954–2025)

Many years ago, I was giving a presentation—on what it means to measure musical expectation, no less—at a music analysis conference in Wales. At one of the coffee breaks, I told someone that I was originally from Columbus, Ohio, and they responded: “Oh, that's where David Huron is. You probably get to chat with him all the time whenever you go home!” This thought had never occurred to me. “One does not simply call up David Huron,” I remember thinking.

But I did just that, and on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, he came into the office to chat with me for a conversation that would end up lasting about four hours. He had no reason to do this—I was not a prospective student; I had no resources to offer—I was simply someone dissertating on a topic that he had written about. That conversation changed much of how I thought about musical expectation, what it means to study music from a computational and cognitive perspective, and, more grandly, living a scholarly life filled with music.

Three years later, I was offered a post-doc in his lab. Convinced that this was the result of the impression I had made in our original meeting, I was eager to update him on how my thinking had developed and tell him how much his work had shaped my own thinking. It quickly became clear, however, that what had been spectacularly important to me had been a forgettable part of his normal way of being.

I’ve since learned that the number of people who have had a very similar experience is quite large. Regularly, people will say something along the lines of, “David Huron talked with me on the phone and we chatted for hours! It changed everything for me!” David will be remembered for many things: his pioneering work in computational musicology, his research on music and emotion, his workshops on empirical methods in music research, his award-winning articles and books, founding an open access journal, and the many undergraduates, postgraduates, and post-docs he mentored. But when David passed away on June 5 of this year, the community also lost someone who shaped the thinking of so many individuals through his sheer kindness, generosity with his time, and a sincere desire for his academic field (and all of the people within the field) to succeed. He will be remembered for his human qualities as much as his scientific achievements.

Over time, David and I became close friends. What started as a mentor-mentee relationship evolved into that of colleagues when I returned Ohio State to succeed him in running the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Lab. We would meet regularly to do what academics do best: discuss interesting new publications, gossip about university politics, and spiritedly disagree with one another. When David retired in 2019, I inherited his office and everything inside of it, and I felt honored to sit at the desk of my mentor and try to carry on the tradition of music cognition in the lab that he founded.

I didn’t sit at the desk long, though. After a term and a half, we were all working from home during COVID. Then in 2021, I was asked to join the faculty of Northwestern University. I knew the weight of my decision, but David encouraged me to go. To my surprise and delight, the weekly conversations continued unabated. Conversations about developments in the field and related academic gossip continued. Every Friday afternoon until the end, I was lucky enough to be able to talk with David about anything he had on his mind. It came as a total shock, then, when I learned only a few months ago that David Huron was not his original name.

David Brian Harrison was born in Peace River, in the Canadian province of Alberta, in 1954. His father was a World War II pilot who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and would later work with the Veterans Land Administration; his mother was from Delia, Alberta, and was transferred to Peace River in 1946 while working for the Provincial Land Office. The family moved around a lot as a result of his father’s work, and David attended the Canterbury High School, a performing arts school that allowed him to immerse himself in an intensive study of music theory and musicianship. David would then attend the University of Waterloo, where in 1978 he completed a degree in the Integrated Studies program, which allowed him to combine his interests in music, psychology, computer science, and engineering.

His very interdisciplinary program of study was just one of many situations in his life that he would describe as “just dumb luck.” David’s ability to expand the boundaries of the fields of musicology, music theory, music cognition, and psychology all stemmed from his willingness and ability to engage with literature from a shockingly broad range of scholars (I’ve inherited books on a wide range of topics, from the social history of the telephone to elephants taking LSD). After graduating, David worked as a composer and also in organ repair, both of which would inform his early work on voice-leading, Bach, and the perception of polyphony. Much of this work continued through his dissertation, to his award-winning 2001 article in Music Perception, and up to his 2016 book, Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art.

In the midst of these intellectual perambulations, David was invited to a music festival for a program made up entirely of his compositions. He was overjoyed until the organizers called back a day later to say that there had been a mistake and they had intended to invite the other David Harrison. David thought of the beautiful lake he would sit beside to think while at the University of Waterloo, and decided to change his name to David Huron; he would make the name change official in 1984.

He completed his PhD at the University of Nottingham in 1989, studying with the noted Brahms scholar Robert Pascall, but focusing on Bach. He had brought an early personal computer with him to Nottingham (and would speak of the huge custom-made transformers required to get it to work in the UK). A friend of his wrote the first AWK compiler for the IBM personal computer, and gifted it to David before he left Canada for the UK. Thus began the early days of a computational toolkit that would allow him to search through lines and columns of encoded musical scores. David was present in 1976 as an undergraduate when the organizers of the DARMS project hosted a conference on their toolkit, and he left feeling inspired by the possibilities, but convinced that they were not thinking about search in the right way. David’s toolkit, which he would call Humdrum in the hopes that someone would someday do better, would allow him scour collections of musical scores on a scale that had previously only been possible with large, well-funded projects. David brought these methods to the personal computer, and worked to distribute his code to anyone who wanted it. His design choices would inform many—if not all—of the toolkits and formats that would come after.

After completing his PhD, David was appointed Assistant Professor of Music at Conrad Grebel College at the University of Waterloo in 1989, and was promoted to Associate Professor after just two years. Inheriting his old office, I came across his tenure application, and it was both humbling and inspiring to see the amount of work he’d been able to complete during this short period of time. While at Waterloo, David worked at the Center for Society, Technology, and Values, and served as both an Associate Professor of Psychology (1994–1997) and Adjunct Professor of Systems Design Engineering (1994–1997), in addition to his post in music. In January of 1998, David was given the opportunity to start a lab at Ohio State. He took over an unused floor that had been a dance studio in the 1970s, and would make it into a hub of music science research for the next 20 years. He would advise dozens of scholars at all levels, and would publish more than 200 articles and four books.

His preferred method of mentorship was one of demonstration and demystification. In my first week working with David, we sat down together at his desk and wrote the first draft of an article in an afternoon. To watch him navigate his terminal (he wrote every article and book in vi) was to watch someone who had seemingly freed himself of all of the mundanities and anxieties that typically accompany writing and just focus on the actual writing. He would then revise repeatedly, resulting in a text with such clarity and relatability that you felt as though he was writing directly to you. He frequently commented on how this was what he loved about writing: he was able to express himself in a way that he felt he couldn’t extemporaneously.

When his declining health could no longer be ignored, I made a trip to San Francisco to visit him in the hospital. I arrived to find him ready to work, jokingly dressing up for the occasion, with his “long menu” of projects ready to go. We spent days going through everything from minor footnotes and sentence structures to outlines of entire sections and chapters of his final book. He spoke of how thankful he was for his wonderful life with music, and how much his beloved Kristin meant to him. David called me three days before he passed away to tell me that he was not much longer for this world, and we then proceeded to spend the entire meeting discussing work projects. That our last conversation was about work was difficult for me to swallow at first, but—at least with me—David always seemed happiest when talking about research. In The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell writes that “consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but it is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life. And consistent purpose embodies itself mainly in work” (p. 197). David was the perfect example of what it means to lead a meaningful and happy life of the mind. He would often say that my goal as an academic should be the same as his: to not end up an embittered old man. David was joyous until the end, boasting about his students, excitedly discussing his research projects, and always planning what was next on the docket. I hope that we can all live our lives in such a way: finding purpose and meaning in what choose to fill our days with, and making time for students and strangers along the way.