Morwaread Farbood is Associate Professor and Associate Director of Music Technology in the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions at New York University. She is also affiliated with the Max Planck/NYU Center for Language, Music, and Emotion (CLaME) and the Music and Audio Research Laboratory (MARL). Her research focuses primarily on understanding the real-time aspects of music listening, in particular how emergent phenomena such as tonality and musical tension are perceived, in addition to developing computer applications for facilitating musical creativity based on cognitive models. She is the co-founder of the Northeast Music Cognition Group (NEMCOG), an organization that brings together music perception researchers in the Northeast Corridor region of the United States, and has served on its Executive Committee since its inception. She also served as the executive organizer of the 2019 Society for Music Perception and Cognition Conference, which was hosted at NYU. She is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Empirical Musicology Review and the Executive Board of the Society for Music Theory; she also served as Associate Editor of the journal Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain from 2018-2021. Her publications have appeared in a variety of journals including Music Perception, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. As a harpsichordist, Farbood won First Prize in the 2005 Prague Spring International Harpsichord Competition and is the recipient of the Pro Musicis International Award.

Earlier in her career, Professor Farbood developed Graphical Score Interface (GSI), a software environment that facilitates music composition by providing users with graphical tools for visualizing, manipulating, and generating high-level musical structures. The core design elements are based on Hyperscore, a software application designed by Farbood to help users with little or no musical training to compose music. A tension model within GSI serves as a way for users to visualize and shape the dynamic flow of their compositions from a large-scale perspective. Color is mapped to motivic material, which can be designated by the user or automatically determined by the system using an algorithm that extracts recurring melodic patterns from both audio and symbolic representations of music. The ultimate goal of GSI is to enable users of all musical backgrounds to create, edit, and analyze musical material through the assistance of an intelligent musical system based on models of music cognition.