News

Many congratulations to the four CMS undergraduates who did music and science dissertations this term, and received a stellar set of marks, all high firsts: one 75, two 78s, and one 80!Reuben Bance: Harmonic style classification of jazz pianists in a source-separated piano trio datasetZaki Lim: Exploring the emotional response to music-evoked nosta…

Good luck to Huw Cheston, current CMS PhD student, who starts an internship with Spotify today! Huw will be developing new machine-learning models for better understanding how different people contribute individual stylistic elements to musical recordings.

We are very happy to hear that Xiaoyue Zhou, summer project student at the CMS (2023), has been awarded a PhD studentship at University College London. Xiaoyue will be working with Prof. Maria Chait and Prof. Neil Burgess. Congratulations Xiaoyue!

We are proud to share that Claire Brillon, recent CMS MPhil student (2022-23), will be starting a funded PhD later this year at McGill University. Claire hopes to study the emotions of timbre, and will be perfectly located to do so with Stephen McAdams and Marcelo Wanderley. Congratulations Claire!

We are very pleased to hear that Lottie Anstee, recent undergraduate student at the Centre for Music and Science (2021-22), has just received a PhD scholarship from Goldsmiths, University of London. Lottie will be starting the PhD in September, working with Lauren Stewart and Katie Rose Sanfilippo. The project concerns developing a culturally infor…

We are pleased to share our just-published paper in the journal Nature Communications, entitled 'Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales'. This work represents a long-term collaboration with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Nori Jacoby) and…

We are delighted for Xiaoxuan Wang, recent CMS MPhil student (2022-23), who has just accepted a PhD position at the Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab (DCML) at EPFL, Switzerland. The DCML is run by Martin Rohrmeier, himself an alumnus of the Centre for Music and Science. The current plan is to use deep learning to model syntactic structures in m…

Hearty congratulations to CMS PhD students Xi Zhang and Sam Leak for successfully completing their PhD vivas! Xi’s thesis was entitled ‘Singing in Chaozhou: The relationship between tones and songs’. Sam’s thesis was entitled “Can adults learn absolute pitch? Evaluating the ‘Melody Triggers’ method”. Both impressed their examiners with the breadth …

Congratulations to our undergraduate students who completed research placements at SoundOut this summer! SoundOut is a world leader in new music testing, helping major record companies to predict how music will resonate with customers, and helping organisations to match brand personality to music.Project titles:Reuben Bance: Using a text-to-music g…

We just got back from from an inspiring ICMPC17 (International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition) in Tokyo. It was so great to hear from music psychology laboratories over the world, and to reconnect with old friends and colleagues.Several of our CMS members presented at this conference, including PhD student Huw Cheston. You can catch …

The seminar list for Michaelmas 2023 has now been published on the CMS seminars page! We are excited to have guests joining us from institutes around the world, including Europe, the United States, and Australia, to talk about a variety of topics spanning pitch, rhythm, timbre, and memory.

The Autism Research Centre at the Cambridge Department of Psychiatry is looking to appoint a research associate (fixed-term) to manage a randomised controlled trial of music therapy with autistic children. The application deadline is 10 September 2023. For more details see the following link: https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/41476/

Applications for British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships are now open for a start date from 1st September 2024. This is an excellent opportunity to conduct an independent postdoctoral research project at the Centre for Music & Science.British citizens and any nationals from the European Economic Area are eligible, regardless of where their doctora…

We are very proud of Lottie Anstee, CMS alumnus, whose undergraduate dissertation paper has now been published in the journal Music Perception. The paper describes a large-scale quantitative investigation of potential associations between handedness and musicality in secondary school students. Congratulations Lottie!Anstee, L., Müllensiefen, D., & …

We just published a new paper in the journal Current Biology, entitled "Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution". This was a fun project where we 'evolved' melodies in massive online experiments, getting participants to vocally imitate melodies from each other in long transmission chai…