MEMBER

My research interests are music perception, cognition, and performance. The science of music has a long history: scholarship across the ages has maintained that music is attuned to the structures and regularities of the external world. A new dimension is offered by contemporary research: responses to music reveal the operation of perceptual, cognitive, and affective processes through which the brain interprets the external world. In our laboratory, we study listeners’ abilities to evaluate, recognize, remember, and produce music and music-like materials. The components of music that we have studied include melody, harmony, duration, rhythm, and meter. Our research addresses theoretical issues in both cognitive psychology and contemporary music theory. In addition to our research with music within the Western tonal-harmonic idiom, we are exploring the adaptability and flexibility of perceptual/cognitive systems to appreciate novel musical idioms and the idioms of other cultures.