What is Music, That it Moves Us?

Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, author of The Evolution of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2010), is an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist. His main interests are in bioacoustics and the evolution of cognition, and particularly the evolution of human speech, language, music ad art, all studied from a strongly comparative perspective. His research focuses on experimental investigations of vocal production and cognition in humans and a wide range of vertebrates, including chimpanzees, monkeys, seals, deer, dogs, alligators, ravens and parrots.

Fitch’s undergraduate training was in Biology and Medicine, and his Ph.D. in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, both at Brown University. He pursued postdoctoral training in the Speech & Hearing Sciences Program (Harvard/MIT) and thereafter occupied a Lectureship at Harvard University, first in Biology and then in Psychology. In 2004 he moved to the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, where he was promoted to Reader in the School of Psychology, and in 2009 he moved to his current position in the School of Life Sciences in Vienna. He has been an invited guest at the European Institute for Advanced Studies (Berlin) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), and occupied the visiting Leibniz Professorship at the University of Leipzig.