Farshad Jafari
Farshad Jafari is a PhD student at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, based at the Centre for Music and Science. Supervised by Peter Harrison, his research explores computational approaches to music and other expressive media, focusing on modelling musical aesthetics and emotional meaning across cultures, genres, and historical periods. His PhD examines how musical and multimodal structures shape aesthetic and affective experience, and how computational models can be used to represent and interpret these relationships.
Farshad holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science and a Master’s in Music Technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where his thesis involved creating a multimodal dataset of film music from 1,800 films across 12 countries. This dataset now serves as a foundation for his doctoral research, providing a large-scale cross-cultural resource for exploring how music conveys emotion and meaning in audiovisual contexts.
Alongside his academic research, Farshad is active as a filmmaker, playwright, and creative technologist. His broader research interests include musical expectancy, computational analysis of dramatic tension, and the study of synesthetic experience across artistic forms.
He is co-funded by the OOC AHRC DTP and the Cambridge Trust.
