news

• Our PI, Samuel Mehr, was awarded the NZ Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize!
• If you'd like to hear about our current research, this interview on Radio New Zealand includes some discussion of our newest studies.
• Collaborator Elika Bergelson discussed our research into language experience and music processing with Marco Werman on Public Radio International's The World.
• 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).

people

Samuel Mehr

Principal Investigator (website)

Sam is an Eastman-trained musician and Harvard-trained scientist interested in how and why human minds are designed to perceive and produce music. He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has lived in Rochester, Boston, Somerville, and Cambridge (USA); Wellington (New Zealand); Montréal (Canada); and now Auckland (New Zealand). You can follow Sam on Bluesky, where he often posts about being an academic dad.

Eun Cho

Postdoc

Eun is a music educator specializing in early childhood music and a researcher, interested in interdisciplinary research that encompasses music, education, psychology, and culture. Since the completion of her DMA in music education (University of Southern California), she has been leading various research projects on the psychological aspects of everyday musical experiences in diverse populations. Aside from being an academic, she is a happily married mom with two kids, based in sunny California.

Courtney Hilton

Postdoc

Courtney studies how minds, music, and culture interact and uses citizen science to study psychology globally. He grew up in rural Western Australia, studied at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, joined the lab as a postdoc postdoc at Harvard, and continues now at the University of Auckland. Courtney loves to make music, cook, spend time in nature, and generally hang out with his partner and their two cats.

Carol Ann Blank

Affiliated Postdoc

Based in New Jersey, US, Carol Ann Blank manages Research and Inclusion Support Services for Music Together Worldwide. A recent postdoctoral fellow with Drexel University's Music, Creativity and Wellness Lab, she is also a research assistant with Able Arts Works, a music therapy practice in Los Angeles. She owns Music Therapy Services of Central NJ. As a researcher, Carol Ann is most fond of literature reviews (doing them!), pulling data for systematic reviews, conducting interviews, thematic analysis of qualitative data, and mixed methodologies. She is least fond of choosing statistical analyses, but loves watching others run stats!

Logan James

Affiliated Postdoc

Logan is a biologist who investigates acoustic communication in animals. He completed his PhD with Jon Sakata (McGill University) studying biases in how birds learn and produce songs. Currently, he investigates call preferences in frogs with Mike Ryan (UT Austin/Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute), as well as how frog communication signals vary across species. He has recently expanded his cross-species comparisons to analyze biases in acoustic perception in a range of species such as crickets, tree frogs, sparrows, and humans.

Juliet Barry

Graduate student

Juliet is a PhD student in the psychology department at the University of Auckland researching pitch perception and language acquisition in infants. She received a degree in Linguistics and Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She worked as a lab coordinator in the psychology department investigating the development of emotional regulation across childhood. Outside of the lab, Juliet enjoys ballet and swimming in the ocean.

Mila Bertolo

Graduate Student

Mila is a PhD student in Neuroscience at McGill University, working with Jon Sakata and Isabelle Peretz, and co-advised by Samuel Mehr. She works on questions about the origins of music, using tools from cross-cultural work, developmental psychology, and cross-species comparisons. You can follow her @mila_bertolo.

Matthew Luke

Graduate Student

Matthew Luke (they/them) is a Master’s student at the University of Auckland. After developing an interest in the psychology of music during their undergraduate degree, they joined the Music Lab to focus their research on implicit measures of rhythmic perception. Outside of the Music Lab, Matthew is an avid bassist and a fan of experimental music.

Gage Quigley-Tump

Graduate Student

Gage is a PhD student in psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Auckland, investigating auditory imagery. His research focuses on the physiological measurements of anauralia and auditory imagery. He enjoys playing guitar and listening to heavy metal.

Jan Simson

Graduate Student

Jan joined the Lab at the beginning of 2019 as a research intern before returning full-time after graduating from his bachelor’s. He is currently finishing up his master’s in Psychology/Behavioral Data Science at the University of Amsterdam and has written his thesis with the lab trying to better understand what it is that makes us like music. In his free time he enjoys bouldering and playing tennis as well as the occasional bike ride. You can follow him @_jansimson.

Zoé Schelp

Graduate Student

Zoé is a PhD student in psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Auckland investigating anauralia, the inability to imagine sounds (a phenomenon like aphantasia, but for the ear). Her research is focusing on the effects of anauralia on verbal and non-verbal working memory. Outside of studies and teaching, she loves playing violin and guitar, reading, sewing and cooking/baking and winter sports.

Marty Snarskis

Graduate student

Marty (they/he) joined the University of Auckland PhD program in February 2023. They are working on The Natural History of Song project, a rich dataset with music from all over the world, as well studying social inferences in infants. They previously studied the computational neuroscience of decision-making and perception at the University of Rochester and, after graduating, managed a lab studying memory at the University of Chicago. Marty enjoys being eccentric, playing music and other arts, reading widely, and hugging trees!

Lidya Yurdum

Graduate Student

Lidya is a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam, co-supervised by Disa Sauter and Samuel Mehr. She studies the role of culture in human communication, focussing on non-verbal vocalisations and music. Lidya joined the Music Lab in 2019 as a summer RA, and has since continued to collaborate remotely from her new home in the Netherlands. She has a Research Masters in psychology from the University of Amsterdam. In her free time you can find her climbing/gymming/crocheting/baking (but definitely not running).

Sorour Zekrati

Graduate Student

Sorour is a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of Auckland. Her research focuses on pitch perception and examines the effect of conceptual metaphors on the way speakers of different languages (Persian and English) perceive and conceive pitch. Alongside her academic pursuits, Sorour enjoys graphic designing, learning new languages, reading psychology books, and listening to podcasts.

Laurence Silk

Honours student

Laurence is completing a research internship at the music lab during his undergraduate degree where he is majoring in psychology at the University of Auckland. In his free time he loves running, hiking, snowboarding and almost anything involving spending time in the outdoors.

Maxx Shearod

Honours student

Maxx is a senior at Yale University studying Cognitive Science with a theme in Musical Cognition. For his senior thesis, he has joined the Music Lab team to investigate the perception of rhythms. In his free time, he's an avid music listener, concert fanatic, and merch collector.

Carter McCaskill

Postgraduate Associate

Carter's work focuses on evaluating interventions that promote healing and resilience in children, families, and communities. Carter is passionate about improving care for parents, children, and adolescents affected by traumatic experiences while contributing to preventative measures that interrupt the intergenerational cycle of mental health disorders. Outside of the lab, Carter enjoys hiking and hosting board game nights with friends.

Estelle Lai

Research Assistant

Estelle is an Honours student at the University of Auckland. She has a passion for psychology and music which has led her to join the Music Lab where she conducts research on the social implications of music. When she’s not studying, her interests outside of music include painting, reading, gaming and finding good places to eat.

Lucas Oland

Undergraduate intern

Lucas is an undergraduate student at Yale University from Arizona who is beyond excited to travel to Auckland for a research internship with The Music Lab. His previous research focused on language network connectivity in Alzheimer’s patients using task-based fMRI. Outside of the lab, Lucas enjoys performing in musical theater and singing with his college a cappella group.

Sania Nourbakhsh

Research Assistant

Sania recently completed their Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics and Psychology at the University of Auckland. Since being awarded a UoA Summer Research Scholarship, she joined our team to support The Music Lab’s infant studies. She is passionate about communication, especially in relation to hearing and phonology, and aims to begin post-graduate study in speech therapy and/or audiology in 2025. When she’s not studying, Sania loves rock climbing and will most often be found exploring their local regional parks and bouldering gyms.

Grace Munro

Undergraduate Intern

Grace is an undergraduate student at the University of Auckland studying a Bachelor of Advanced Science, majoring in Psychology. In her free time she loves singing in choirs, songwriting, swimming, and is an avid concert goer.

collaborators, past and present

• Roza Kamiloğlu
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Quentin Atkinson
  University of Auckland
• Aaron Benjamin
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Charlie Chubb
  UC Irvine
• Joshua Fiechter
  Kairos Research
• Carolyn Fredericks
  Yale University
• Luke Glowacki
  Boston University
• Reyna Gordon
  Vanderbilt University Medical Center
• Gregory Hickok
  UC Irvine
• Joshua Hartshorne
  Massachusetts General Hospital
• Daniel Ketter
  Missouri State University
• Dean Knox
  University of Pennsylvania
• Max Krasnow
  Harvard University
• Tony Lambert
  University of Auckland
• Linda Mayes
  Yale Child Study Center
• Daniel Müllensiefen
  Goldsmiths, University of London
• Timothy O'Donnell
  McGill University
• Isabelle Peretz
  Université de Montréal
• Jon Sakata
  McGill University
• Disa Sauter
  University of Amsterdam
• Adena Schachner
  University of California, San Diego
• Manvir Singh
  University of California, Davis
• Diana Tamir
  Princeton University
• Sandra Trehub (d. 2023)
  University of Toronto, Mississauga
• Xiaoqin Wang
  Johns Hopkins University
• Ellen Winner
  Boston College
• Sarah Woolley
  McGill University

We also work with many others on the Natural History of Song project: learn more at themusiclab.org/nhs.

alumni

Pip Brown
Visiting PhD (2023), based at the University of Warwick.

Ekanem Ebinne
Research Assistant (2022-2023).

Rachel Yan
Affiliated grad student (2020-2022), currently a PhD student in Psychology at the University of Michigan.

Jingxuan Liu
Affiliated grad student (2020-2023), currently a PhD student at Columbia University.

Judy Lee
Research Assistant (2020-2021).

Cody Moser
Affiliated grad student (2018-2022), currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Collective Intelligence, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco.

Alex Mackiel
Research Assistant (2021), currently a PhD student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Chicago.

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

Anna Bergson
Summer intern (2019), currently practicing social work in Washington DC.

Brooke Milosh
Summer intern (2019), currently completing medical school at Hofstra University.

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.

Dylan Feng Xing
Summer intern (2018), as of August 2024 Dylan is completing a postdoc fellowship as a clinical psychologist at the Yale Health Center.

Kelsie Lopez
Summer intern (2018), currently a PhD student in the Plasticity in Neurodevelopment Lab with Dr. Laurel Gabard-Durnam in the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health.

Alma Bitran
Summer intern (2018), currently a PhD student at Rutgers University working in the DBT-RU practicum training site.