Honing researches the role of perception, attention, expectation and memory when listening to music. He hereby analyses the cognitive mechanisms which form the basis for musicality. In his research, Honing uses theoretical, empirical and computational methods.

In 2009, Honing’s research group, in collaboration with Hungarian researchers, showed that newborn babies can hear the ‘beat’ in music. This research result supports the thesis that beat induction (i.e. rhythmic sense) is an inherited and music specific skill. Honing’s research would also suggest that rhythmic sense played an important part in the creation of music. With this in mind, Honing will during the coming years further his research into three sub-disciplines. Firstly, Honing will research the mechanisms that form the basis of musicality such as rhythmic sense and relative hearing. At the moment, he is busy researching, in conjunction with Mexican researchers, to what extent we share these characteristics with other primates. Secondly, Honing will strive to further develop and evaluate the methodology of computational modeling, especially the role surprise plays in these type of models. Lastly, Honing will explore the role that Internet can play when examining the music listening process. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) recently made grants available for Honing’s research projects.

Henkjan Honing received his PhD in 1991 from the City University (London) for research conducted on the representation of time and temporal structure in music. Between 1992 and 1997, Honing worked as KNAW Academy Researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam, where he performed research into the formalisation of musical knowledge. Until 2003 he also worked as research coordinator at the Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information (NICI)in the field of computational modeling of music cognition. In 2007 Honing was appointed associated professor of Music Cognition at the Musicology capacity group of the UvA. In addition to his teaching and researching duties at the UvA, Honing also holds the KNAW Hendrik Muller Chair at the Faculty of Humanities.

Honing is the author of more than 150 international publications related to music cognition and music technology. He recently published a book for the general public titled Iedereen is muzikaal. Wat weten we over het luisteren naar muziek (Nieuw Amsterdam 2009). An English edition of this book exists and is titled Musical Cognition: A Science of Listening (Transaction Publishers 2011).