
Participate with your baby!
We are now recruiting expecting parents and parents with babies under 4 months of age for science research about the world's music. This 10-week study will start with a live Zoom meeting. Then you will use a smartphone app to learn songs and keep track of your baby's sleep and mood. We provide cool visualizations of your results along with baby prizes and gift cards.
The study is based at our Yale University site, but you can participate from anywhere in the world.
learn more
If you are reading this, you are probably doing so on a device that plays music. You are probably able to hear and understand that music. You probably can also produce music of your own, even if you've never had music lessons. You probably engage with music on a regular basis, regardless of your cultural background, location in the world, or socioeconomic status. You have probably been this way your whole life.
In the Music Lab, we're figuring out why the human mind is designed in such a way that all of the above is true. We do basic cognitive science experiments with many different populations and with people who live all over the world, including in small-scale societies. We also work on large corpus studies of ethnographies and field recordings from the Natural History of Song project, which we host.
The Music Lab is based jointly at the University of Auckland (in New Zealand, as a part of the School of Psychology) and Yale University (in New Haven, as a part of the Yale Child Study Cnenter).
On this site, you can learn more about us and about our work, read our papers, and participate in experiments online!
news
- Our cross-cultural research on infant-directed speech and song was covered on the front page of the New York Times, on the TODAY show, and in many other spots worldwide.
- We've moved — after 5 years at Harvard, we have transitioned our citizen-science platform to Yale University and our brick-and-mortar lab to the University of Auckland (New Zealand).
- Our paper "Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies" is out in Nature Human Behaviour - thank you to all the families that helped make this project possible!
- Our new Natural History of Song paper is out in Science!
people


Courtney Hilton
Research Fellow
Eun Cho
Postdoc
Logan James
Affiliated Postdoc
Lidya Yurdum
Research Assistant
Ekanem Ebinne
Research Assistant
Mila Bertolo
Graduate Student
Marty Snarskis
Graduate student
Zoé Schelp
Graduate Student
Estelle Lai
Graduate student
Jan Simson
Affiliated Graduate Student
Rachel Yan
Affiliated Graduate Student
Jingxuan Liu
Affiliated Graduate Studentcollaborators, past and present
- Quentin Atkinson
University of Auckland - Amy Belfi
Missouri University of Science and Technology - Aaron Benjamin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Pramit Chaudhuri
University of Texas, Austin - Charlie Chubb
UC Irvine - Joseph Dexter
Dartmouth University - Joshua Fiechter
Ball Aerospace - Luke Glowacki
Pennsylvania State University - Reyna Gordon
Vanderbilt University - Gina Grimshaw
Victoria University of Wellington - David Haig
Harvard University - Gregory Hickok
UC Irvine - Joshua Hartshorne
Boston College - Daniel Ketter
Missouri State University - Dean Knox
Princeton University - Max Krasnow
Harvard University - Caitlyn Lee
Independent Developer - Christopher Lucas
Washington University in St. Louis - Alia Martin
Victoria University of Wellington - Solena Mednicoff
University of Nevada Las Vegas - Daniel Müllensiefen
Goldsmiths, University of London - Timothy O'Donnell
McGill University - Isabelle Peretz
Université de Montréal - Steven Pinker
Harvard University - Disa Sauter
University of Amsterdam - Adena Schachner
University of California, San Diego - Beau Sievers
Harvard University - Manvir Singh
Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse - Elizabeth Spelke
Harvard University - Diana Tamir
Princeton University - Sandra Trehub
University of Toronto, Mississauga - Sebastian Waz
UC Irvine - Ellen Winner
Boston College
We also work with many others on the Natural History of Song project: learn more at themusiclab.org/nhs.
alumni
Cody Moser
Affiliated grad student (2018-2022), currently a PhD student in Cognitive and Information Sciences the University of California, Merced, working in the Smaldino Lab.
Liam Crowley
Honours student (2019-2021), currently a PhD student in Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington.
Mila Bertolo
Lab manager (2019-2021) and summer intern (2018), currently a PhD student in Neuroscience at McGill University, working in the Sakata Lab
S. Atwood
Lab manager (2018-2019), currently a PhD student in Psychology at the Human Diversity Lab at Princeton University.
Constance Bainbridge
Research Assistant (2018-2020), currently a PhD student in Communication at the University of California, Los Angeles, working with Greg Bryant.
Julie Youngers
Summer intern (2018), currently working in the North Kansas City public schools.
recent papers
join
We are recruiting a PhD student to be based at the University of Auckland (New Zealand; apply here). Candidates interested in PhD study in Psychology at Yale can also be based in our lab, if working jointly with another Psychology faculty member. If you are interested in joining us in any of these roles, please contact Dr Mehr at sam@yale.edu.
We do not currently have any open positions for full-time, salaried research assistants, but are able to host part-time RAs working in New Zealand or New Haven. If you are interested in such a position, for hourly pay; or if you would like to apply to work with us for academic credit (at the University of Auckland or at Yale) or work-study (at Yale), please contact us at musiclab@yale.edu. In general, we do not recruit volunteers, with the exception of students who are sponsored by their home institution to do an internship with us.
If you are a member of an underrepresented group in research, and interested in joining us, we can help you get funded with an NIH Diversity Supplement (details). Please get in touch with Dr. Mehr at sam@yale.edu if you are interested in applying.