Audio Engineering Society UK

Title: When All the Songs Sounds the Same: Insights into the Musical Brain

Location: Royal Academy of Engineering, London
Description: Lecture by Dr Lauren Stewart, Goldsmiths University, London
Start Time: 19:00
Date: Thursday 10th June 2010

The ability to make sense of musical sound has been observed in every culture since the beginning of recorded history. In early infancy, it allows us to respond to the sing-song interactions from a primary caregiver and to engage in musical play. In later life it shapes our social and cultural identities and modulates our affective and emotional states. But a few percent of the population fail to develop the ability to make sense of or engage with music.  The study of disordered musical development sets in sharp relief the perceptual and cognitive abilities which most of us take for granted and give us a unique chance to investigate how musical perceptual ability develops, from the level of the gene to the brain development and the emergence of a complex and fundamental human behaviour.

Dr Stewart is Senior Lecturer and director of a new MSc course:

Music, Mind and Brain at Goldsmiths, University of London

Lauren originally studied Physiological Sciences at Balliol College Oxford, but transferred from bodies to brains with an MSc in Neuroscience and doctoral and postdoctoral training at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience (both UCL) and Harvard Medical School.

Her current research interests ranges from studying those with congenital amusia who have an inability to make sense of musical sound to studying the acquisition of perceptual, cognitive and motor skills in trained musicians.