Research
Research
I work on music theory, analysis, and composition, almost always using computational methods. Computer-aided methods can help not only to advance what we know about a wide range of musical structures, but also what we can do with that knowledge, and who can access it. Central to much of this is the encoding of human analyses in computer-readable formats.
“Mark Gotham is an international treasure and one of the smartest, most insightful people working in computational musicology.” An unusually kind anonymous reviewer, 2026
On this page:
Featured
Much of the recent work centres on the creation, curation, and analysis of musical dataset, particularly human analyses in encoded formats. For example, for harmonic analysis I’ve been curation the “When in Rome” meta-corpus which and used that for …
- research projects using that data for automatic harmonic analysis with machine learning.
- research on that data in itself (Chromatic chords in theory and practice: Paper, Poster, ISMIR 2023 intro video)
- pedagogical / public-facing anthology as discussed here and provided as part of the Open Music Theory textbook here
Publications
Lists of indexed publications are available in all the usual places: publications are available in all the usual places:
- ORCID - partly curated by me,
- Google Scholar - automatic and probably the most complete among them,
- Scopus - automatic,
- Semantic Scholar - automatic,
- Web of Science - automatic,
- Zotero - curated by me
- DBLP - only certain journals/conferences as it’s a “computer science bibliography”.
No need to repeat all of that content here!
Invited Talks
Apart from formal publications, some current/recent keynotes and invited talks are listed on my CV (click here). There come with active URLs that also give an indication of other groups working in related areas. Thanks to all the collaborators and hosts involved!
Coming up in 2026:
- Keynote at the ‘Science ouverte, données ouvertes et musique’ (`Open Science, Open Data \& Music’) event in Amiens, FR.
- Distinguished Lecture in Digital Humanities at the University of Music and Performing Arts (MDW) Vienna, AT.
- Dagstuhl Seminar 24302: Learning with Music Signals: Technology Meets Education., DE
Posters and Videos
Some talks and related conference videos can be viewed on YouTube here. Here are a few recent papers that come with posters and short video summaries:
| Short Title & paper/poster link |
Venue; Year |
Video |
|---|---|---|
| Chromatic chords in theory and practice Paper, Poster |
ISMIR; 2023 |
 |
| Musical Micro-Timing for Live Coding Paper, Poster |
ISMIR; 2023 |
 |
| Musical Genre Recognition Paper, Poster |
EvoMUSART; 2023 |
N/a |
| What if the When implies the What? Paper, Poster |
ISMIR; 2021 |
 |
| Augmentednet Paper Poster |
ISMIR; 2021 |
 |
| Discourse Not Dualism Paper, Poster, & More |
ISMIR; 2020 |
 |