
Visit the Music Lab with your baby!
We are now recruiting babies age 2 to 12 months for science research about the world's music. In the study, babies listen to songs while we measure their heart rate, pupil dilation, gaze, motion, and more!
We are conveniently located on Harvard's Cambridge campus, with free parking, and you can take home a Music Lab onesie or other cool prizes as a thank-you gift.
Please note that we are not currently running in-person studies due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can still sign up to participate in future studies with your baby — we'll contact you when our in-person studies are back in operation.
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 in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. On this site, you can learn more about us and about our work, read our papers, and participate in experiments online!
news
- We are currently recruiting research assistants for Summer 2021! For more information, and to apply, please visit tinyurl.com/musiclabsummer. (Update: Applications are now closed)
- Our new 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!
- New open-access paper about open science & reproducibility, "Sight-over-sound judgments of music performances are replicable effects with limited interpretability" is published in PLOS ONE.
people

Samuel Mehr
Principal Investigator (website)
Courtney Hilton
Postdoctoral Fellow
Logan James
Affiliated Postdoc
Ekanem Ebinne
Research Assistant
Lidya Yurdum
Affiliated Graduate Student
Cody Moser
Affiliated Graduate Student
Jan Simson
Affiliated Graduate Student
Rachel Yan
Affiliated Graduate Student
Liam Crowley
Affiliated Graduate Student
Alex Mackiel
Affiliated Graduate Student
Jingxuan Liu
Undergraduate Researchercollaborators, 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
Mila Bertolo
Lab manager (2019-2021) and summer intern (2018), currently a PhD student in Neuroscience at the Sakata Lab at McGill 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 UCLA, with Dr. Greg Bryant.
Julie Youngers
Summer intern (2018), currently working in the North Kansas City public schools.
recent papers
join
We do not currently have any open positions for research assistants and are not planning on hosting summer interns in 2022. From time to time we hire short-term RAs, who work remotely. If you are interested in such a position, or would like to apply to work with us for academic credit or work-study, please contact us at musiclab@g.harvard.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@wjh.harvard.edu if you are interested in applying.
Dr. Mehr is not currently accepting full-time graduate students, but if you are applying to graduate school and are interested in collaborating as a co-supervised graduate student (either at Harvard or at another university), please contact him at sam@wjh.harvard.edu.