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BAM!! Insights on the Brain & Music 1 of 3

July 14 |12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

How Music Captivates: The Science

ELIZABETH H. MARGULIS, PhD
Professor of Music; Director of Graduate Studies (Musicology), Princeton University

Presentation Synopsis
In her presentation How Music Captivates: The Science, Elizabeth H. Margulis, PhD, discusses the cognitive science of musical transportation and immersion—the way music can captivate you so that nothing seems more important than the next note, or the way it makes you feel like you’re reliving a long-lost personal memory. Margulis’s research explores repetition and the strikingly patterned ways music can shape and guide spontaneous thought. Her use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has allowed her to compare imaged stories evoked by music with imagined stories evoked by speech, and her work on repetition has also touched on what we can learn about musical immersion from earworms and the speech-to-song illusion.

 

About Elizabeth H. Margulis, PhD
Elizabeth H. Margulis, PhD, is a professor of music and the director of graduate studies in musicology at Princeton University, with affiliations in psychology and neuroscience. She studies the perception and cognition of music.

Margulis directs Princeton’s Music Cognition Lab, which brings together students and researchers to ask questions that lie at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. She’s particularly interested in the aspects of musical experience that seem the most powerful while also being the hardest to talk about. The Music Cognition Lab uses experimental data as a provocative, illuminating way into some of the most complex, subjective, and culturally situated aspects of music, which in turn reveals neglected, broader aspects of human cognition and behavior. Margulis has published more than 75 articles in outlets ranging from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to Psychological Review. Her book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory and the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). Her book The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction, which has been translated into six languages, provides an accessible entry into the field. A book she co-edited, The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future, won the 2024 Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society.

Margulis’s work has been featured in outlets such as NPR’s All Things Considered and the BBC, and she’s given public lectures at venues ranging from South by Southwest to the World Science Festival. She’s also been trained as a pianist.

Details

Date:
July 14
Time:
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Organizer

Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival
Phone
888-221-9836
Email
info@sfcmf.org
View Organizer Website

Venue

New Mexico Museum of Art
107 W Palace Ave
Santa Fe, NM 87501 United States
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Phone
(505) 476-5063
View Venue Website