Wednesday November 13th, 2024, from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m., followed by a cocktail. Come and meet him in person!
- Université de Montréal, Pavilion Marie-Victorin, Room D-427 : Please register via the Doodle link.
- The lecture will also be available via Zoom and will not be recorded. No registration is required. Meeting ID: 828 1456 8636 / Passcode: 227784
Human auditory perception supports links between music and health
Abstract: Like vocalizations found across the animal kingdom, music serves a basic communicative function: it reliably transmits information from the minds of people producing music to the minds of people hearing it. Accordingly, music produces reliable psychological responses in listeners, across cultures, and in children and young infants; while our auditory-perceptual systems are designed in part to process musical information, such as tonal and metrical structures. I will present findings placing musicality as a key component of human psychology, of a comparable type to other, more widely studied domains like social cognition, numbers, and language. A practical outcome of this basic science approach to musicality is the discovery of domains where one should expect clear links between music and health; I will conclude with findings from a new randomized trial on the effects of a music intervention on parents and young infants.
Bio: Samuel Mehr is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and an Associate Professor Adjunct in the Child Study Center at Yale University (New Haven). He directs The Music Lab, an international research group working on auditory perception; the psychology of music, speech, and sound; and gamified citizen science. Mehr’s work draws on ideas and tools from cognitive and developmental psychology, data science, and evolutionary anthropology, to ask fundamental questions about the design of the human mind that span across basic science and biomedical research. The Music Lab was established in 2017 at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, with funding from the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and the Harvard Data Science Initiative. In addition to traditional experimental work in cognitive and developmental science, the lab specializes in large-scale citizen-science experiments.