Rate My Professor Andrew Milne

Andrew Milne is Associate Professor in Music Cognition and Computation in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. His academic career there commenced in 2013 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, progressing to Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2018–2020), Senior Research Fellow (2020–2024), Associate Professor and Director of Academic Programs (Music and Music Therapy) (2024–2025), and his current position since 2025. Milne obtained a PhD in Music Computing from The Open University, UK (2009–2013), a Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (2007–2009), and a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University, UK (1985–1988).

Milne’s research specializations encompass cross-cultural music cognition informed by field experiments, including studies in Papua New Guinea; cognition and creative implications of familiar and unfamiliar musical rhythms and harmony, such as microtonal scales; and cognitively informed interfaces, algorithms, and software for music composition, performance, and generation. He develops mathematical models of music perception and emotional responses, with applications in education (e.g., teaching mathematics through rhythms), therapy, public art installations like the Rhythmotron, and supporting group music-making for older adults and people with disabilities. Notable outputs include the Music Perception Toolbox v2.0.0 (2026), RelayerForAll software (2025), and publications such as “Acoustical and cultural explanations for contextual tonal stability” (Music Perception, 2025, with Hearne and Dean), “Micro-variations in timing and loudness affect music-evoked mental imagery” (Scientific Reports, 2025), and “Commentary on Buechele, Cooke, & Berezovsky (2024): entropic models of scales and some extensions” (Empirical Musicology Review, 2025). Awards include an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA, 2017–2020, $369,000), an ARC Discovery Project (2025–2028, $914,548 as lead investigator), and a University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study fellowship (2022–2023). He is Editor of the Journal of Mathematics and Music (2025–2027) and has presented invited talks on digital instruments like the voice-leading Tonnetz.