Grant: Canada Research Chairs

For the past 10 years, my laboratory has studied fundamental processes in music cognition from a number of different perspectives: psychophysics, neuroimaging, social psychology, developmental and special populations. We've gathered basic information about memory for specific musical attributes, the neural correlates of musical structure and emotion processing, the relative independence of musical ability among the neurodevelopmentally impaired, the psychological metric for quantifying musical preferences, and the interaction between vision and sound in the perception of musical performances. I believe that with what we know now, we are on the verge of being able to make truly large discoveries with far-reaching implications. Construction on a new CFI laboratory was completed three years ago, and we've moved into these new state-of-the-art facilities. I've been able to recruit a talented group of students and post-doctoral fellows. I seek funding to continue and expand our innovative research to address a truly important question: Why do humans have music? Related questions include Where did music come from? Why does music have the effects that it does on so many people as opposed to other sounds? I propose to seek the answers to these questions by using two principal and complimen-tary approaches: (1) a classic psychophysical approach, examining how variations in fundamental parameters of music (such as pitch and rhythm) affect listeners' judgments of its emotional, structural and perceptual properties, (2) a social psychology/cognitive psychology approach in which surveys and structured interviews will be used to learn more about why people like the music they do, and how they use music in their everyday lives for emotional regulation. (3) Assays of music-induced neurochemical changes, specifically oxytocin. It has been reported in preliminary studies that singing together modulates the release of oxytocin, a chemical associated with feelings of trust and bonding. I would like to explore this systematically to understand if it extends to all music making, and under what circumstances. I believe these three approaches will be fruitful in gathering data to address these fundamental questions regarding the origins of music. Music has been defined, fundamentally, as variations in pitch and rhythm. Over the next five years, we have a series of studies planned to better understand the nature of the cognitive codes used by listeners in processing pitch and rhythm, and how their interactions affect the overall experience of music.