I got a BA in philosophy from UCL in 1999 and an MA in music composition from Birmingham Conservatoire in 2001. In June 2007, I got my Phd from Nottingham University for a thesis entitled 'Shared Emotions in Music' supervised by Greg Currie. Some collective musical improvisations were submitted along with it. The thesis can be downloaded here: http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/10286/
From September 2007 to September 2010 I was a postdoc at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, which is an institute specializing in emotion research at the University of Geneva. Here I researched emotions, the sublime, character, the relation between aesthetics and emotions, and more on music.
From May 2010 until September 2010 I worked on an EU FP7 technologies project called SIEMPRE (Social Interaction and Entrainment using Music PeRformance Experimentation). This was a 3 year project that I helped to apply for in collaboration with InfoMus lab, University of Genoa, University Pompeu Fabre, Barcelona, Queen's University Belfast, the Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Geneva. The project aimed to investigate emotional entrainment between performers, audience and conductors during musical performance using various bodily and behavioural measures. I remained an associate with this project while engaged in my following research project.
From September 2010 to August 2012 I worked on an individual project at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at QUB, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. This project was called 'The Mood Organ: Putting theories of musical expression into practice' and was aimed at generating music automatically using physiological and behavioural signals that will match the emotional state of the subject. This was a practical music technology project and was geared towards the same ideal of sharing emotions in music that I outlined in my PhD. For a short demonstration of it in action, see http://tinyurl.com/moodorgan
From Sept 2012 to August 2017, I was a temporary lecturer at the University of Sheffield, teaching aesthetics, ethics, the good life, the imagination, mind and language, philosophy of religion, free will and philosophy of education. I was then a temporary lecturer at the University of York until Jan 2018 (teaching the imagination and personal identity). Finally in February 2018 I started as a permanent lecturer at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.
For a more interesting narrative of my journey to a permanent position see here https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2018/04/long-job-market-journeys-tom-cochrane-flinders-university.html
In 2018 I published a monograph entitled 'The Emotional Mind' (Cambridge University Press). The main claim is that all cognition is an elaboration upon negative feedback control loops that I call 'valent representation'. I provide accounts of homeostatic functions, pain and pleasure, the emotions, moods, expressive behaviours, evaluative reasoning, personality traits and long-term character commitments. You can find a journal symposium on it here: https://www.jpeonline.org/issues/2024-volume-5-no-2-winter
My biggest project following this was a book on aesthetics called 'The Aesthetic Value of the World'. In this book, I defend Aestheticism and the idea that a life dedicated to the pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one (Oxford University Press, 2021). You can read the preface here: https://philarchive.org/rec/COCTAV
Since then I've written a philosophical novel about shared consciousness which I'm currently trying to publish. The novel follows up on a case study I published about a pair of conjoined twins whose brains are connected. https://philarchive.org/rec/COCACO-4>. I have also edited a collection of science fiction stories that explore the metaphysics of personal identity. Each story is accompanied with a philosophical commentary. This collection is now forthcoming with Bloomsbury.
Currently I'm writing a book called 'Happiness for mortals'. This will include an article I recently had accepted in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy on fear of death and the will to live https://philpapers.org/rec/COCFOD
