About

Jonathan Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition, and directs the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He holds a DMA in Music Composition from Stanford University, earned in 1983. Berger is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 winner of the Rome Prize. He was the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA, now the Stanford Arts Institute) and the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology. His recent works deal with themes of consciousness and conscience, and include a monodrama, My Lai, which toured internationally and was recorded by the Kronos Quartet. His opera, The Ritual of Breath is the Rite to Resist, was performed at Lincoln Center in July 2024. Other recent premieres include Hajar Yasini for narrator, string quartet, and video, and Mekong:Soul, co-composed with Van Anh Vo, performed at the Kennedy Center and in Houston. Berger has been commissioned thrice by The National Endowment for the Arts, with additional commissions from the Mellon and Rockefeller Foundations, Chamber Music Society, Lincoln Center, and Chamber Music America. In addition to his work as a composer, Berger is an active researcher with over 80 publications spanning music, science, and technology. He has held research grants from organizations including DARPA, the Wallenberg Foundation, The National Academy of Sciences, and the Keck Foundation. He is the principal investigator of a major grant from the Templeton Religion Trust studying how music and architecture interact to create a sense of awe.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Machine Learning
• Speech recognition
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Physics
• Computer vision
• Acoustics
• Art
• Visual arts
• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience

Selected publications

• Metadata Tables

  Stanford Digital Repository · 2026-04-09

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Metadata Table and Corespondence table of all collected IRs 2022-2026

  PublisherDOI

• IRs 2022-2026

  Stanford Digital Repository · 2026-04-09

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Impulse Responses Collected 2022-2026

  PublisherDOI

• I3DA paper

  Stanford Digital Repository · 2026-04-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How virtual acoustics and VR impcat humanities research

  PublisherDOI

• GRAND ROUNDS: A 62-year-old woman with periorbital and preseptal edema and erythema

  Digital Journal of Ophthalmology · 2025-07-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We report the case of a 62-year-old woman with a past medical history of leukemia, stem cell transplant, donor lymphocyte infusion, meningioma, and a prior episode of Sweet syndrome (SwS). She presented with progressive erythema, crusting, and edema in the preseptal and periorbital regions of her left eye. After initial treatment for presumed preseptal cellulitis with broad-spectrum antibiotics, the patient’s symptoms worsened and became bilateral. The absence of systemic infectious signs and lack of clinical improvement raised suspicion for an alternative etiology. Given her history of SwS, a trial of systemic corticosteroids was initiated, resulting in a rapid clinical improvement. The diagnosis of cellulitis was subsequently rejected, and an ophthalmologic manifestation of SwS was suspected. This case highlights the importance of considering noninfectious inflammatory etiologies in patients with atypical or antibiotic-refractory periorbital symptoms—particularly in patients with a relevant medical history.

  PublisherDOI

• The Test of Auditory-Vocal Affect (TAVA) dataset

  2025-10-12

  articleOpen access

  In this paper we present the TAVA, a novel dataset for advancing research in Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) by disentangling paralinguistic and linguistic information in affective speech signals. The dataset includes 352 audio recordings of emotionally expressive English speech, each paired with a corresponding transformed electroglottographic (tEGG) version-a signal designed to preserve affective cues while systematically suppressing phonetic content. In addition, we provide over 120,000 crowd-sourced ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for both the original and transformed signals. These ratings support fine-grained comparisons of affect perception across modalities. Building on prior work showing that tEGG signals can effectively isolate vocal affect, this dataset offers a unique resource for evaluating sensitivity to vocal affect in clinical populations with language or communication difficulties, as well as in studies aimed at dissociating linguistic and affective processing in individuals without these impairments. By contributing a phoneme-reduced, affect-rich signal representation to the SER community, we aim to enable more robust modelling of vocal affect and broaden the applicability of SER systems to diverse user populations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ambisonic Virtual Acoustics Playback Toolkit

  2025-09-10

  articleSenior author

  We present the Ambisonic Virtual Acoustics Playback Toolkit, an open-source framework for curating virtual reality scenes to support musicological and archeological studies that examine the effects of room acoustics. This toolkit utilizes Chunreal, the ChucK music programming language in Unreal Engine, and Spatial Audio Framework (SAF) to compute realtime convolution of first-order ambisonic impulse responses with sound sources (both recorded and live). The toolkit includes features such as binaurally decoding first-order ambisonic signals with head (camera) tracking, dynamically loading 360 degree images and videos, and interactive graphical user interface for building and loading scenes. The toolkit attempts to provide a streamlined workflow for deploying measured audiovisual assets to VR experiences without the need to directly use a game engine while offering extensible APIs for developers who wish to customize the features inside the Unreal Engine project. In addition to presenting the functionalities and workflows of the toolkit with implications for both creative and research applications, we present two case studies that utilize the toolkit for presenting their fieldwork materials and conducting acoustic perception experiments.

  PublisherDOI

• 92EMF Identifying Key Priorities for an Emergency Department Intervention for Youth With Substance Use

  Annals of Emergency Medicine · 2025-08-22

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Living Kidney Donors’ Residential Neighborhoods: Driver or Barrier of Postdonation Follow-Up?

  American Journal of Kidney Diseases · 2025-09-22

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sonic Dimensions of Awe: A Review of Theories, Findings, and Experimental Approaches

  2025-09-10

  article

  For thousands of years, human beings have created architectural spaces that shape our feelings, inspire reflection and connect us to ritual. Of these emotional responses, awe is defined in terms of perceptual vastness and the requirement of cognitive accommodation, and it has been identified as a primary concern in the design of sacred and ceremonial architecture. This paper discusses the reconstruction and analysis of awe-inspiring soundscapes characteristic of ancient ritual environments, using virtual acoustics and immersive technologies.Using spatialized impulse responses and virtual reality (VR), we have created controlled psychoacoustic experiments to investigate how auditory characteristics including reverberation time (RT60), echo density, and spatial diffusion come together to influence both the phenomenological and physiological components of awe. Expanding on recent cognitive-behavioral models, we measure awe’s evocation using a variety of multimodal measures, including the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S), skin conductance response (SCR), and narrative recall. We hypothesize that that acoustic characteristics—namely, prolonged reverberation and diffuse spatial envelopment—are critical to increase self-transcendence, temporal dilation, and emotional absorption. This proposition highlight sound as an active agent in the evocation of spatial awe and further demonstrate the utility of virtual acoustics in the study, preservation, and design of awe-inspiring experiences.

  PublisherDOI

• Case - Thrombophlebitis of the inferior mesenteric vein secondary to compression of an adjacent ureteral stone

  Canadian Urological Association Journal · 2025-07-28

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dorry L. Segev

  New York University

  37 shared

• Erin Hall

  Georgetown University

  28 shared

• Elliott R. Haut

  Johns Hopkins University

  28 shared

• Joshua C. Grimm

  The University of Texas at Austin

  25 shared

• Paula Ferrada

  25 shared

• Pamela A. Lipsett

  Johns Hopkins University

  25 shared

• Robert A. Montgomery

  NYU Langone Health

  23 shared

• Jacqueline M. Garonzik‐Wang

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  22 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

Awards & honors

• 2017 Guggenheim Fellow
• 2016 Rome Prize