When people ask about my work, I always say “broadly speaking, I study how the brain processes music.” Our lab emphasizes using naturalistic stimuli to study real-life perception, cognition, and communication.
More specifically, I’ve been working on:
- how the brain processes hierarchical structure in music, at the level of sections and phrases, and what happens when that music is scrambled at different timescales (SMPC 2022 poster)
- how the brain encodes auditory and musical features to see if different features can better predict neural activity in different brain areas (in collaboration with Sam Norman-Haignere)
- relating acoustic and musical features to subjective ratings of overall perceptual similarity (CogSci 2023 poster) and emotional qualities of music (valence and arousal)
- understanding the relationship between how similar two songs are and how similar the evoked autobiographical memories are (in collaboration with Kelly Jakubowski)
- using joint music performance as a way of understanding real-life communication (Izen et al., 2023)
See my CV for full list of posters and publications.