What can psychoacoustics reveal about the sound of music?

Dr. Josh McDermott is a perceptual scientist studying sound, hearing, and music at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. His research in hearing addresses sound representation and auditory scene analysis using tools from experimental psychology, engineering, and neuroscience. His research in music perception derives from a desire to understand why music is pleasurable, why some things sound good while others do not, and why we have music to begin with.

McDermott obtained a B.A. in Brain and Cognitive Science from Harvard, an M.Phil in Computational Neuroscience from University College London, a Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Science from MIT, and postdoctoral training in psychoacoustics at the University of Minnesota. He currently works in the Lab for Computational Vision at NYU, using techniques from image processing and computer vision to explore auditory representation.