Professor Eric Clarke
Professor Eric Clarke
Emeritus Professor of Music (Heather Professor 2007 – 2022)
Eric Clarke went to the University of Sussex to read for a degree in neurobiology and graduated with a degree in music. After an MA in music, he was awarded a PhD in psychology from the University of Exeter, and was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in music at City University in London from 1981. He was appointed as James Rossiter Hoyle Professor of Music at Sheffield in 1993, and took up the post of Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford in 2007. He was for many years on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Music Perception, Musicae Scientiae, Psychology of Music, Music Analysis, Empirical Musicology Review, Radical Musicology, and Per Musi. He was an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM, 2004-9), and of the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP, 2009-14), was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Transforming C19th Historically Informed Practice (TCHIP, 2016-21), and was on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Oslo-based research centre RITMO (RITMO, 2022-7). He was elected to Membership of the Academia Europaea in 2009, and to Fellowship of the British Academy in 2010. His research covers a number of areas within the psychology of music, music theory, and musical aesthetics, with publications on topics including expression and coordination in performance, the perception and production of rhythm, musical meaning, the relationships between music and language, the analysis of pop music, the history and aesthetics of recorded music, music and the body, music and consciousness, and music and empathy.
Publications
Books
Practice in Context: Historically Informed Practices in Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. (Co-editor with Claire Holden and Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey)
Remixing Music Studies. Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook Abingdon: Routledge, 2021 (Co-editor with Ananay Aguilar, Ross Cole and Matthew Pritchard)
Music and Consciousness 2. Worlds, Practices, Modalities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. (Co-editor with David Clarke and Ruth Herbert)
Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. (Co-editor with Mark Doffman)
Music and Consciousness. Philosophical, Psychological and Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. (Co-editor with David Clarke)
Music and Mind in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. (Co-author with Nicola Dibben and Stephanie Pitts)
Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005
Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Co-editor with Nicholas Cook)
Articles and book chapters (selected)
Music, emotions and consciousness. In P. Juslin (Ed) Handbook of Music and Emotion, Second Edition Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2027. (Co-author with Ruth Herbert)
Agency, creativity and (inter)action in orchestral performance In G. Michaelsen and C. Stover (Eds) Making Music Together. New York: Oxford University Press 2026 (Co-author with Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey)
Technologies for investigating large ensemble performance. In R. Timmers, F. Bailes and H. Daffern (Eds) Together in Music: Coordination, Expression, Participation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021 (co-author with Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey)
Digital methods for the study of the nineteenth-century orchestra. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 18 (Special Issue 1: The Digital Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Music), 2021, 19–50 (co-author with Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey
The psychology of creative processes in music. In N. Donin (Ed) The Oxford Handbook of the Creative Process in Music Oxford: OUP, 2018
Music’s meanings. In R. Timmers and R. Ashley (Eds) Routledge Companion to Music Cognition. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017
Empathic entanglements. Music, motion, dance. In P. Veroli and G. Vinay (Eds) Music-Dance. Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse, Abingdon: Routledge, 2017
Syncopation affects free body-movement in musical groove. Experimental Brain Research, 235(4) (2017), 995-1105 (co-author with Witek, M.A.G., Popescu, T., Hansen, M., Kringelbach, M. & Vuust, P.)
Creativity, collaboration and development in Jeremy Thurlow’s Ouija for Peter Sheppard Skærved. Journal of the Royal Musical Association,141 (2016), 113-165. (Co-author with Mark Doffman and Renee Timmers)
Ideological, social and perceptual factors in live and recorded music. In G. Borio (Ed) Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, Abingdon: Routledge, 2015, 23-40.
Music, empathy and cultural understanding. Physics of Life Reviews 15 (2015), 61-88. (Co-author with Tia DeNora and Jonna Vuoskoski)
Expressive performance in contemporary concert music. In D. Fabian, R. Timmers and E. Schubert (Eds) Expressiveness in Music Performance Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 98-114 (with Mark Doffman)
Effects of polyphonic context, instrumentation and metrical location on syncopation in music. Music Perception, 32(2) (2014), 201–17. (Co-author with Maria Witek, Morten Kringelbach, and Peter Vuust)
Crossmodal interactions in the perception of expressivity in musical performance. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 76 (2014), 591-604. (Co-author with Jonna Vuoskoski, Marc Thompson and Charles Spence).
Lost and found in music: Music, consciousness and subjectivity. Musicae Scientiae 18(3) (2014), 354-368.
Music, space and subjectivity. In G. Born (Ed) Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 90-110
Distributed creativity and ecological dynamics: a case study of Liza Lim’s “Tongue of the Invisible”, Music & Letters, 94(4) (2013), 628 – 663. (Co-author with Mark Doffman and Liza Lim)
What’s going on: music, psychology and ecological theory. In M. Clayton, T. Herbert & R. Middleton (Eds) The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. Second Edition. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012, 333-342.
Rhythm/body/motion: Tricky’s contradictory dance music. In A. Danielson (Ed.) Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, 105–20