Come and meet him in person!
- Wednesday, November 19th, 2025, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m., followed by a cocktail.
- Université de Montréal, Pavillon Marie-Victorin, Room D-427 : Please register via the Doodle link
New attempts to probe tonal and metrical intuitions across the lifespan
Abstract: Evidence from a wide variety of sources suggests that two core systems underlie human musicality: tonal and metrical perception. The systems show evidence for automaticity, encapsulation, universality, human uniqueness, and relatively early development (review: Mehr 2025, Trends in Cognitive Sciences). Despite their apparent importance in structuring naturalistic auditory input in our species, relatively few tools are available to directly assess listeners’ perception of tonal or metrical information in music. In this talk, I will present new approaches to this problem, including the first studies of tonal intuitions in infants, gamified experiments on tonal intuitions in children and in a large citizen-science sample, and initial findings from associated work on metrical perception. So far, the evidence demonstrates the utility of new tools for assessing high-level perceptual phenomena in music and suggests the generality and early development of tonal intuitions, with the potential for similar results in the metrical domain.
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.
