This is a Hybrid event

Onsite location: Minot Room, Countway Library 5th Floor

Event Speakers:

Psyche Loui

Psyche Loui is Associate Professor of Creativity and Creative Practice in the Department of Music and director of the MIND (Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics) lab at Northeastern University, and violinist in the Boston area’s Longwood Symphony Orchestra. She graduated from Duke University as an undergraduate with degrees in Psychology and Music and from University of California, Berkeley with her PhD in the Psychology of music. Dr. Loui studies the neuroscience of music perception and cognition, tackling questions such as: What gives people the chills when they are moved by a piece of music? How does connectivity in the brain enable or disrupt music perception? Can music be used to help those with neurological and psychiatric disorders? Dr. Loui’s work has been supported by National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, and has received multiple Grammy awards, a young investigator award from the Positive Neuroscience Institute, and a Career award from the National Science Foundation. She is passionate about merging the sciences and the arts as shown in her new edited volume, The Science-Music Borderlands, published this year by MIT Press. Her projects have been featured by the Associated Press, New York Times, Boston Globe, BBC, CNN, the Scientist magazine, and other news outlets.

Deirdre Loughridge

Deirdre Loughridge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Northeastern University. Her research centers on the history of music, science, and technology, and currently revolves around questions of music’s roles in conceptions of “human” and “machine.” Her first book, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2016), examines with the rise of optical technologies in scientific and popular culture and their impact on musical discourses and practices, and won the Kenshur Prize for outstanding monograph in eighteenth-century studies. With Elizabeth Margulis and Psyche Loui, she is co-editor of the book The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future, published by MIT Press in May 2023. Her new book Sounding Human: Music and Machines 1740/2020 will be published by University of Chicago Press in December 2023, and explores how musical artifacts have been—or can be—used to help explain and contest what it is to be human historically and today.

Elizabeth H. Margulis 

Elizabeth Margulis is Professor of Music, with affiliations in Psychology and Neuroscience, at Princeton University. She directs Princeton’s Music Cognition Lab. Her research has been featured in outlets ranging from Netflix’s Music: Explained and NPR’s All Things Considered to the New York Times and the BBC. She is the author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, which won awards from the Society for Music Theory and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, and of The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction, which has been translated into six languages. Her co-edited volume, The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future, appeared this year with MIT Press.  

Aniruddh (Ani) Patel (Moderator) 

Aniruddh (Ani) Patel researches the cognitive, neural, and evolutionary foundations of music cognition. He received a BA in biology from the University of Virginia (1987) and an AM (1990) and Ph.D. (1996) in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University. He then joined The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, CA, where he was a Senior Fellow from 2005-2012.  He is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Tufts University. Areas of special interest include the relationship between music and language (the topic of his 2008 book, Music, Language, and the Brain, Oxford Univ. Press), the processing of musical rhythm, and cross-species studies of music processing.  A wide variety of methods are used in this research, including brain imaging, behavioral experiments, theoretical analyses, acoustic research, and comparative studies with nonhuman animals. Dr. Patel has served as President for the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (2009-2011).  In 2015 Dr. Patel was appointed as Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), in the Program in Brain, Mind, and Consciousness.  In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book on the evolution of music cognition.

About the Book:

Interdisciplinary essays on music psychology that integrate scientific, humanistic, and artistic ways of knowing in transformative ways.

Researchers using scientific methods and approaches to advance our understanding of music and musicality have not yet grappled with some of the perils that humanistic fields concentrating on music have long articulated. In this edited volume, established and emerging researchers—neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, musicians, historical musicologists, and ethnomusicologists—build bridges between humanistic and scientific approaches to music studies, particularly music psychology. Deftly edited by Elizabeth H. Margulis, Psyche Loui, and Deirdre Loughridge, The Science-Music Borderlands embodies how sustained interaction among disciplines can lead to a richer understanding of musical life.

The essays in this volume provide the scientific study of music with its first major reckoning, exploring the intellectual history of the field and its central debates, while charting a path forward. The Science-Music Borderlands is essential reading for music scholars from any disciplinary background. It will also interest those working at the intersection of music and science, such as music teachers, performers, composers, and music therapists.

Book Contributors:
Manuel Anglada-Tort, Salwa El-Sawan Castelo-Branco, Hu Chuan-Peng, Laura K. Cirelli, Alexander W. Cowan, Jonathan De Souza, Diana Deutsch, Diandra Duengen, Sarah Faber, Steven Feld, Shinya Fujii, Assal Habibi, Erin. E. Hannon, Shantala Hegde, Beatriz Ilari, Jason Jabbour, Nori Jacoby, Haley E. Kragness, Grace Leslie, Casey Lew-Williams, Deirdre Loughridge, Psyche Loui, Diana Mangalagiu, Elizabeth H. Margulis, Randy McIntosh, Rita McNamara, Eduardo Reck Miranda, Daniel Müllensiefen, Rachel Mundy, Florence Ewomazino Nweke, Patricia Opondo, Aniruddh D. Patel, Andrea Ravignani, Carmel Raz, Matthew Sachs, Marianne Sarfati, Patrick E. Savage, Huib Schippers, Jim Sykes, Gary Tomlinson, Jamal Williams, Maria A. G. Witek, Pamela Z