David Huron (1954–2025) was a pioneering figure in music cognition whose work focused on topics including emotion, music and expectation, evolution, computational musicology, and the auditory principles behind voice leading. 

David began his career at Conrad Grebel College at the University of Waterloo, moving to Ohio State University in 1998. At Ohio State he founded the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory, which he directed until his retirement in 2019. He supervised dozens of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers and taught empirical research methods to nearly two hundred students and visiting scholars in innovative week-long summer workshops.

David authored nearly 200 scholarly publications, delivered over 400 presentations, and developed the influential Humdrum Toolkit, which enabled scholars to use computers to query large collections of musical scores—now referred to as corpus studies. He received numerous honors including the Society for Music Perception and Cognition’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2017), the Society for Music Theory’s Lifetime Membership Award (2019), the University of Amsterdam’s Nico Frijda Honorary Chair in Cognitive Science (2021), delivered the prestigious Astor Lectures at Oxford, the Donald Wort Lectures at Cambridge, The Lectures in Computational Musicology at McGill, the Music and Mind Lectures at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the Bloch Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. 

His 2006 book Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation won the Society for Music Theory’s Wallace Berry Award and is a landmark work explaining how musical pleasure arises from the mind’s predictions about what comes next. His 2016 volume Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art offered a comprehensive perceptual account of this fundamental musical practice, while his book The Science of Sadness: A New Understanding of Emotion (2024) explored grief, melancholy, and nostalgia. Three more books were near completion when he passed away in 2025, and are being finished by close colleagues and former students.