He conducts his research under the auspices of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, and the University of Amsterdam's Brain and Cognition center.

Honing obtained his PhD at City University (London) in 1991 with research into the representation of time and temporal structure in music.

During the period between 1992 and 1997, he worked as a KNAW Research Fellow (Academieonderzoeker) at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, where he conducted a study on the formalization of musical knowledge.

Wat we weten over het luisteren naar muziek (Nieuw Amsterdam, 2009/2012), published in English as Music Cognition: The Basics (Routledge, 2021), and Aap slaat maat.

Op zoek naar de oorsprong van muzikaliteit bij mens en dier (Nieuw Amsterdam, 2018) that appeared in English as The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search of What Makes Us Musical (2019, The MIT Press).