Kim Mills: Are there songs that take you back in time? Maybe that summer anthem that played endlessly the year you were 16, or the first dance from your wedding, or even an ad jingle from childhood? Whatever it is, hearing even a snippet of the right music can transport us back decades and make us feel the emotions we felt back then. Today we’re going to talk about why that happens and the many ways that music, memory, emotion, and imagination intertwine.
So why do some songs make us happy or sad? Why do some give us chills and others make us want to dance? Why do some pieces of music transport us back in time? Is there a reason that people are especially attached to music from their teenage years? How do our culture and our expectations affect the way we experience music? And finally, why are we so drawn to some songs that we want to listen to them over and over again? Yet when other songs get stuck in our heads, we call them earworms and they drive us slightly crazy?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
My guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Margulis, who directs the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University. Her research combines cognitive science, musicology, and music theory to study questions such as how music intersects with memory and imagination, how culture affects the way we experience music, why we like repetition in music, and why some songs become earworms. She’s the author of many scientific papers and three books: On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind; The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction; and her latest, The Science Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future. Before she became a researcher, Dr. Margulis trained as a classical pianist. She holds a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Music and a PhD from Columbia University.
Dr. Margulis, thank you for joining me today.
Elizabeth Margulis, PhD: My pleasure. So happy to be here.
Mills: I talked a moment ago about how the right song can transport us back to a particular time or a moment in our life. Why is that? Why is music so strongly connected to memory?
Margulis: People have been fascinated by this question for ages, and in fact, it’s not only music that people suspect to have this power. So think of the famous madeleine de Proust, where you take a bite or smell something from your childhood and suddenly all kinds of vivid details come back to you. So because there are other sensory stimuli that can have a similar effect, one of the first questions people have asked is, is there really anything special about music when it comes to autobiographical memory?
And one of my favorite studies on that topic was conducted by Amy Belfi, and what she did was compare the autobiographical memories that were prompted by hit songs from specific years versus famous faces that had a lot of airtime in those same specific years. The idea is they’re both kind of similarly repeated and kind of in circulation at a particular time. So she’d just show people the face or play people a bit of the song and ask them whether it triggered some memory from their life and if so to describe it. And she found indeed that the music produced especially vivid kind of memories, so people had more kind of descriptive language, more sensory detail. It was really coming back in a more lifelike way than it was for simply the prompt of a visual image and a face. So it really seems to be a real phenomenon.
Mills: So why do so many people get especially attached to music from their teen or young adult years? I mean, most of us aren’t wearing the same clothes or reading the same books that we did back then, but we’re still listening to the same music. Why do we do this?
Margulis: For better or for worse, indeed. I think there’s an interesting clue we get about that from looking at the other eras of our life that function similarly. So we do have a reminiscence bump for the music of our adolescence. That means, number one, we tend to recognize more of it, continue to listen to it more. I think this is amply evidenced in the Super Bowl this year where I think a lot of millennials got excited about the Usher songs and a lot of current teenagers were kind of confused.
And then, people have more autobiographical memories for music from their adolescence, but there’s also a little smaller secondary reminiscence bump for music from people’s parents’ adolescence. And the thinking there is that when you’re a tiny person and you don’t have agency over the radio, your parents are in control of what you’re hearing while they’re making you dinner or going about cleaning up your messes or what have you. So you get this kind of early repeated exposure to the music that they are stuck with from the time that they were teenagers. So it kind of propagates generationally. So there really is a lot of evidence that it has to do with exposure. And people think a lot about the idea that during your adolescence you’re really invested in developing your identity and making links with other people around shared aspects of your identity. And music plays this important function in solidifying those connections and those social roles.
Mills: So it’s almost that there’s a connection to brain development?
Margulis: Yeah, exactly. There are ideas about that. And I mean, part of the reason that this really matters is because there are really interesting clinical ramifications too. I mean, it’s kind of fun and interesting that the music of our adolescence sticks with us. But this can be really important for people experiencing dementia, for example, where if you really calibrate the right music and expose them to something that was really meaningful to them at that time of their life, there’s lots of evidence that this can trigger memory improvements and interesting clinical potential as well.
Mills: Let’s talk for a minute about the connection between music and emotion. What makes a song sad or happy? Does happy music have to be in a major key while sad music is in a minor key? What role do lyrics play? And what about tempo?
Margulis: First on the lyrics topic, I’d say people really vary. It sort of seems to be a trait-level characteristic that people reliably are different on. Some people really pay attention to lyrics and remember all the details of what a singer is saying in a particular song. And others of them, like myself, have heard a song maybe 300 times, could sing the whole thing, but I have no idea what the actual words are. I just don’t pay attention. And there’s a certain number of people who are really one way or the other, and you tend to not move back and forth that much between this.
And so the emotion piece is pretty interesting because people do use music frequently for mood regulation. You’re really depressed, and so you turn on some particular song or some particular album. And what’s interesting there is sometimes the music that makes you feel better paradoxically is sad music. So I’m sad, I go put on an album of songs that also feel really sad and maybe I have some sense that my sadness is seen or validated or shared, sort of like a surrogate social experience there with music. And so what this means is that sometimes I can get happier through music that’s expressive of sadness. So one thing researchers are really careful about is distinguishing what emotion the music is expressing, seems to be expressing, versus how that makes you feel. So sometimes sad music can make you feel happy.
Mills: But again about key, I mean, it doesn’t have to be a minor key to be sad. You can have music in a major key and it could still trigger sadness?
Margulis: Absolutely. Yes, that’s right. Yes. And in fact, really I think if we really understood the formula to a song with a particular emotion, I mean we’d be living in a different world than we live there. And the idea is there’s all this interesting stylistic change happening all the time. We develop—so there are certain kind of standard things that tend to happen in the songs you listen to, and then those standard things become overused and people kind of get sick of them. And then the style changes. That’s how you get it to be that you can put a song on the radio and say, “oh, I don’t know that song, but it sounds like it’s from the 2010s, or that sounds like it’s from the 1980s because there are these certain features that kind of come through and then fade out.” And part of that has to do with things that were surprising and interesting kind of become standardized. So it’s a dynamic kind of process. There’s no constant eternal way to have produced a certain effect in music. It’s a really dynamic interaction between what’s happening in the styles, the music you’re listening to a lot, how you respond to it, how that changes. This is really a more exciting, richer process.
Mills: Let me ask an aesthetic question. Are there pieces of music that are considered universally beautiful? For instance, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who hates Pachelbel’s Canon, and I think a lot of people think that Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is a wonderful song. Are there others? And what constitutes music that is considered universally beautiful, if there is such a thing?
Margulis: I love that you brought up Pachelbel’s Canon in D because in fact, I have a great counter example to your claim, which is this one cellist slash comedian—you can find this on YouTube—has an entire routine called the Pachelbel Rant, where he complains about not only having to play Pachelbel’s Canon in D and all these kinds of processionals, but then super complains about the fact that the same progression that underlies that piece can be found in 8 million other songs as well. So he’s just fed up, makes him crazy. So yeah, the idea about universality in music is music feels so powerful to us, we have so little sense of how it works intuitively, it feels kind of magic, that it’s tempting to think whatever profound experience I’m having to this song must be universally shared. It’s hard to put yourself in another set of ears and imagine the way something might sound different.
But in fact, lots of research shows that even very basic things about how a particular chord sounds or how particular collection of pitches sounds really varies according to the kind of exposure that you’ve had within your life and the musical systems that you’ve been trained up on in terms of your ear. So we’re really finding that this prescription for universality is really not there in exactly the way that our intuition would sometimes suggest.
Mills: On the other side of the same coin, what about music that’s considered universally ugly or unpleasant? I’m thinking about during the Renaissance, the Catholic Church forbade the use of the augmented fourth, which they called “diabolus in musica.” What was it about this particular chord that got people so riled up and is there music that’s universally considered ugly, for want of a better descriptor?
Margulis: So people think a lot about dissonance, about notes that you play them together and they kind of sound grating or they don’t sound sweet and sonorous together. And there’s a big history of psychoacoustic explanations. Think about this idea that there’s something about the physical property of resonating bodies, that there’s a long history of people thinking, “oh, there’s these small special kind of numeric relationships between pitches that sound good together and that’s why they sound good.” And this is like must be kind of a baked-in feature. Whereas we now know, for example, with work by Josh McDermott and Nori Jacoby, Melinda McPherson, they worked with people in rural Bolivia called the Tsimané who don’t have a lot of music that has multiple voices going on at once. So usually it’s kind of one melody at a time. And they basically made a bunch of songs for them taking these melodies and adding another line so that you had either a very sweet sounding consonant kind of series of sounds or a quite grating dissonant series of sounds—that was either a dissonant accompaniment to this melody that was quite familiar to them or a consonant accompaniment.
And the Tsimané had no trouble whatsoever noting that these were different kinds of accompaniments you could categorize—those ones kind of go together, these ones that sound sweet, these ones that sound grating kind of go together. But there was absolutely no difference for them in terms of which they liked or found pleasurable. Truly, they tested so many different ways. There was just nothing about a consonant accompaniment that they liked or enjoyed any more than a dissonant accompaniment. And I mean, I have a range of friends with such varied musical tastes, including people who swear that they can’t get their children to sleep without playing death metal. It’s to each their own. Yeah.
Mills: What about exposure to music across cultures? I mean, it’s almost like food. In some cultures you would eat a kind of food, which in America we wouldn’t like. And there’s music that comes from the East that may sound dissonant to our ears where our music may sound dissonant to Eastern ears. I mean, how does this come about? Is it a matter of what we’re exposed to in our youth? What becomes acceptable and consonant to us?
Margulis: Yeah, it’s very similar to what happens in language acquisition. So if you look at little tiny babies and what they’re able to detect in terms of phonemes, in terms the basic units of language, there’s a lot they can do before they specialize and prune their abilities and become little experts in their own language. So an example would be distinguishing between the sounds of “r” and “l,” but in some other languages, those sounds are kind of together in one category. And so depending on the kind of exposure a baby has, they’ll either kind of develop this ability to separate different kinds of continuous changes on the spectrum from “r” to “l” into two different binary categories or not. And you really see this ability develop, or I mean, another way of thinking about that is they lose the ability to make that distinction if that distinction is not relevant in their language.
And we see the same thing with music. So there have been great studies with babies using special kinds of musical meters. So most of the songs that we hear on the radio, let’s say in the States, are going to be in two or in three groups of beats. They’re in groups of two or three, these kind of simple meters. So they’re evenly divided. Whereas in other styles, so Balkan folk music for example, it’s very common to have meters that are in five or seven. You have uneven groups, you have three followed by two, and then three and then two. And that’s very unfamiliar for other kinds of musical styles.
So babies, it turns out, start out—it’s no problem for them. They don’t care if it’s a group of five or a group of two or a group of seven, they’re equally good at all of them. But then you keep raising them in the U.S. or Canada or something and they lose that ability by like 12 months old. They don’t know what’s going on with the five—the groups, music in groups of five or seven. But what’s cool is you can resurrect that ability really easily. So researchers just gave the parents CDs of some Balkan folk music, sent them home and said, over the course of a week, just occasionally play this CD. They did that and then the babies came back and suddenly they're perfectly—visibility is back, no problem. So just passive exposure to certain kinds of sonic patterns is enough to support the development of that ability at that age.
It’s not so easy if you try to do the same thing in an adult, it takes a lot more exposure and a lot more explicit training to regain an ability that you lost when you were a kid. So there’s lots of parallels there to what it’s like to try to learn a language when you’re older versus when you’re a kid. Really similar kinds of sets of processes.
Mills: So there are areas in the brain for speech and smell and hearing. Is there a music area in our brain?
Margulis: That’s a question that animated a lot of research for a lot of time, and the answer really seems to be no. In fact, it seems to be that what’s so amazing and special about music is that it draws on so many other different abilities and so many other different parts of your brain. So if you think about what’s needed to just perform or even listen to and make sense of and be moved by music, there’s these motor aspects, motor control regions about, in fact, even if you passively listen to music, it turns out you rely on motor areas of your brain to process music that has a beat. There’s this very tight connection between the auditory and the motor system. You need to have cognitive faculty to be able to process and evaluate the sounds and make sense of how they relate to one another, to make sense of what the song might be about. You have to have some kind of empathetic or emotional kind of sense. There’s really, it just starts combining so many different things, which is one reason that people look to musical training as a resource or scaffolding in all kinds of other abilities across the course of development.
Mills: So if there’s no musical center in the brain, how do we understand what happens to people say, who were never musical in their lives, have a head injury and can suddenly play Beethoven?
Margulis: Right? There are all kinds of oddities of that sort. One is tone deafness, where in fact—this is kind of an interesting phenomenon because as I’m talking now, I bet a certain percentage of people listening are like, “That is me. I am definitely tone deaf.” But in fact, lots of people who think they’re tone deaf are really not, because if someone’s truly deaf, the standard is that, the test for assessing that, involves listening to a melody and then you listen to the same melody and one note is super off, and people who are tone deaf cannot hear it. They don’t know if the melodies were the same or not. But it’s completely obvious to anyone who is not tone deaf that those are not the same. Often someone who’s claims they’re tone deaf, it’s totally apparent to them that something dramatic has changed. What makes them think they’re tone deaf is that they have trouble singing, which can be a production problem, like a problem with controlling your voice to match what you hear, versus a perception problem, which is what tone deafness is.
And this kind of goes for the whole kind of range of special skills and special deficits related to music, is that it has to do with little sub parts and components and ways things are connected. So you can get these interesting dissociations where, for example, somebody loses the ability to produce speech like they have aphasia, but they’ve preserved the ability to sing, for example. And that seems mysterious. Why could someone not be able to say the sentence, “I lost my book,” but can sing Mary Had a Little Lamb with no problem whatsoever? So there’s a whole kind of way of treating aphasia or addressing it that relies on the preserved ability to sing, where people gradually scaffold in more speechlike utterances on top of the song that they’re still able to produce.
Yeah. So I guess what I’m saying in response to your initial question is that there’s a whole complex interconnected world, so you can just snip out or damage any kind of one part of it, and there’s compensatory things that arise in another area or some specific symptom that appears, but that’s not kind of characterizing your performance overall, but is maybe just affecting one bit of how you perform musically.
The thing about, you mentioned, which is these tales of people who’ve had a stroke or something and then become incredibly interested in music and just produce a ton of music. I think there’s a really interesting kind of thing there that has to do with motivation and interest, which is increasingly acknowledged as a key part of musicality. Let me give you a couple of examples here. So one of the things that people in my field have been trying to do is figure out a way of measuring individual differences in how musical any person is. Because some people, they’re just curating their CDs all day—I guess they’re not—their playlist, they’re curating their playlists all day, they’re going to concerts all the time, they’re weeping when they hear things. It’s really moving to them. So it’s not enough to find out if they played an instrument or if—you have to really start asking questions about musical interests and responsiveness and sensitivity to music.
And so as people have developed those instruments to really be able to measure how musical people start out this piece about how much interest they have in music and how much motivation they have has seemed more and more important. And in fact, a substrand of research in my field currently has to do with genetic approaches. So trying to look at what might be the genetic underpinnings of these individual differences in musicality. And one of the things that’s coming up there that’s interesting is that it doesn’t seem so much that musical ability itself in terms of performing on an instrument is directly genetically encoded, rather motivation for practicing and interest in and desire to really focus and do this thing a bunch seems to have more of a clear genetic kind of prompt than musical ability itself directly.
So I think that’s something you’re seeing there is that there’s just this incredible interest that can happen under certain circumstances and understanding where it comes from and how to cultivate it in people who maybe don’t and start out having that passion is very much an open set of research questions, I think is super interesting.
Mills: Can musical ability be cultivated in almost anyone? I mean, you’re talking about how practice makes you perfect in a sense, but can people who really don’t have that inclination can they become more musical with time and effort?
Margulis: Over the past few years, there’s an increasing number of longitudinal studies where they’ve really looked at cohorts of kids who are randomly assigned to music lessons and music ensemble experience compared to random assignment to some other kind of set of interventions. And looking at how that goes year in and year out. A person who’s doing really interesting work, there is Assal Habibi at USC. Yeah. And they’re really finding that there’s a host of benefits that can accrue for people across those kinds of experiences where you might not care so much about, do they become the most proficient clarinet player in the world, but you really might care about how much they like coming to, how much they have a sense of self-worth and connectedness to the kids around them? How much are they meeting state levels and reading and math? I mean, so I’m not trying to say that musical training is only there to serve these other ends. There’s an important component in and of itself, but lots of these measures are being studied because they’re kind of important as far as making the case for funding and involvement of music in schools.
Mills: Well, let’s talk about repetition in music. Your first book was called On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. What role does repetition play and what got you interested in studying this particular aspect?
Margulis: As I was starting out in this field, the models that were really dominant all had to do with language. It was like, here’s something about how we know that speech works. Let’s take that framework and use it to think about how music works. But there was one part of music that just couldn’t fit into that paradigm, and that was how kind of ludicrously repetitive music is. Because there’s just almost no circumstance in conversation or other kinds of ordinary language uses where you would repeat yourself to the degree that music ordinarily does. And we seem to like it, right? The chorus comes back several times in the song, but that’s not enough. We also have to just then listen to the whole song again and again. In fact, to a degree that sometimes I think people fail to acknowledge themselves. And when their Spotify Wrap appears at the end of the year and they see they listen to Radiohead’s specific song like 800 times or something, it’s a little bit sobering.
But it really seems like that’s an important part of how music works for us. We string together these chains of what happens, we are able to sing it through in our head. We have this sense of participating along with it that seems to be important. And so I really wanted to look at repetition and figure out what it was doing and what it was giving us and not try to pretend that it wasn’t existing, which is, I think people were kind of stressed out or embarrassed in music with that repetitive, and were trying and maybe not make a big deal out of it.
Mills: But sometimes songs that we don’t want to think about get stuck in our heads, those dreaded earworms. Why does this happen? And are there some songs that are especially likely to become earworms? And then how do we get rid of them?
Margulis: There is some evidence that we’re kind of indulging in a sort of mental replay, often in order to better encode a series of events that we’ve experienced, and that there’s just certain circumstances where they pop up into consciousness. This is kind of a terrifying thought that there might be lots of earworms percolating in your mental landscape. There’s only some of them that kind of pop up into consciousness and that you actually recognize.
But yes, there are definitely certain songs that tend to be particularly catchy. And I mean, it’s not the same for everyone necessarily. I’ve known people who are big classical music heads that can get a Brahms symphony theme stuck in their head. But typically it’s these really, really catchy songs. You think of Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe, people talk about that one a lot. And then there’s really terrible ones, like It’s a Small World After All, that plays in the Disney World ride.
And there’s lots of evidence about what causes something to pop up as an earworm. It helps if it’s quite singable kind of song, straightforward, in a tempo that you can kind of move along with easily, and that it’s simple enough that you can kind of follow along. But there’s also some hook. There’s something a little unusual that you get up on or get stuck, get stuck about. And really, the cues can be quite oblique. So you can be outside on a walk and you pass a dog that seems to be roaming around over here, and then before you know it, you have Who Let the Dogs Out stuck in your head. Really literal triggers. It’s actually just something interesting you can do is the next time you have a song stuck in your head, really think back. And it turns out when people try to figure out what prompted it, they’re often quite good at it. It had some literal kind of prompt.
They’re also contagious, because—this happens in my household all the time, that somebody doesn’t really realize they have a song stuck in their head. They kind of hum it without even realizing they’re humming it. And then that person humming it cues it in me, and then I start singing it and my kid is like, “how did you? That’s in my head? What?”
So yeah, it really propagates in these kind of zany ways, and they’re very normal. This is a really important thing to know about. Earworms are super common. Almost over 90% of people have them at least once a week. Lots of people have them at least once a day. Very normal.
Mills: And isn’t it a goal, say, of Madison Avenue? They want us to remember their annoying jingles, and a lot of us I know have commercials stuck in our heads forever.
Margulis: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And sometimes there’s text that is just so ridiculous that if it was spoken to you, you would just laugh, right? Yet somehow they can stick it on top of a tune and you’re like singing along. Yeah. That’s why there are these hilarious YouTube videos where people just take songs, song lyrics and read them in a really serious voice. And it’s so silly. You can just get away with so much in a song that you can’t ordinarily.
Mills: Now, you’re also interested in how music is linked to imagination and how the stories and the images that we associate with types of music can vary by person and by culture. Can you talk about that a bit?
Margulis: Yes. We have this really wild kind of experimental task that we have been using where we’ve just been playing people clips of songs, and we just asked them to tell us a story that they imagined. So we asked them first if they imagined a story, and then if they did, we asked them to tell us their story. What we’re discovering there that has really surprised us so much and has launched a whole series of further studies is that even if I’m just doing this, playing people songs they’ve never heard before, one at a time in a soundproof booth, playing them a song, asking them to tell me a story—somebody else seven states away will do the same thing and they’ll tell me the same story. So there really are these patterns, these sonic patterns that we’re picking up just in our environment that have these very clear associational kinds of denotative meanings that people are able to decode.
And I think this is part of why you can get film music libraries where you just can go there and say, I want music that’s for a chase scene, but it’s really stressful, but it’s also kind of funny. And then you have musical excerpts there for you to use in your film. And the reason that can work is because there just are these sound environment patternings that people are incredibly sophisticated navigators of. And so this is a really sensitive way of detecting that people have grown up with some kind of broadly shared cultural experiences. I can just play you a song, play me a song, and sort of depict the images that we’re having in our head are often the same, which I think is most people wouldn’t expect, and it’s pretty fun.
Mills: How do visual images affect our reaction to music?
Margulis: Yeah, I think they’re huge. It turns out, even if we’ve done these studies where we’ve just asked people after we play them something, “what’d you think about while you were listening to that?” They could say, they could be like, “oh, I was thinking it was too loud.” Or like, “oh, I was thinking I needed a sandwich.” Or they could say anything. And the most common things they end up saying are picturing some kind of fictional story, picturing a movie, remembering something that really happened to them, visual imagery. So all these things that are these imaginative remembered responses. And I think this is one of the, we zone out frequently in a very pleasant way when we’re listening to music. It sort of enables us to coast on it or daydream in this way that can be very satisfying. And in fact, where a lot of our emotional response to music might come from, it might not be exactly that the sound itself is cuing an emotion. It could be rather that the sound is cuing some specific image or it’s cuing some memory and that image or memory is cuing the emotion. And I think that’s really something that’s happening a lot more than we might expect
Mills: Given these almost universal connections between music and certain emotions, how effective is music as a therapeutic device?
Margulis: There’s so much interesting work in that space right now, and I think one of the really interesting problems that people are trying to crack there is figuring out how, instead of having a one-size-fits-all, here, use this Lynyrd Skynyrd song, and this will cure all of your—But it’s like, what do we know about your cultural background? What kind of stuff have you listened to? How can we tailor a musical program for you for whatever the circumstance may be? And I think it’s in that space that a lot of really interesting work on music and medicine is happening at the moment.
Mills: And what’s next for you? What are the big questions you’re looking at now?
Margulis: I’m so interested in this whole phenomenon of musical daydreams, mostly because the same way that it felt like people harbored them secretly and for a while. Until it started coming out and people were like, wait, earworms are a thing. And then there was research about them and it was like, that’s very cathartic. I feel like daydreams occupy a little bit of the same space where sometimes you’re listening to music and you might feel you’re doing it wrong because you’re not paying attention, but we’re seeing that actually the daydreams people experience track very closely the particular changes and events that are happening in the music. So you are listening. You’re listening in this way where it’s fueling some really important set of images or imagined experiences or remembered experiences that you’re having. So we’re really working on studying those from a whole bunch of different perspectives.
Mills: Well, Dr. Margulis, I want to thank you for joining me. We could go on forever talking about music. There’s just so many interesting aspects of what you’re working on. Thank you.
Margulis: Thank you so much.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, PhD, author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind and The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction, directs the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University. Her research pursues questions that lie at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. She was also trained as a pianist.
