Ian Cross is Emeritus Professor of Music & Science, having retired in 2021 as Director of the Centre for Music and Science where he led a lively group of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in exploring music, its materials and its effects from a wide range of scientific perspectives.
His early research helped set the agenda for the study of music cognition; he has since published widely in the field of music and science, from the psychoacoustics of violins to the evolutionary roots of musicality. His recent research has followed three main tracks, focusing on exploring relationships between speech and music as interactive media, on the effects of engagement in group musical activities on the capacity for and expression of empathy, and on the ways in which we engage with musical scores.
He is presently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Music & Science, and is Principal Investigator on a Leverhulme-funded project entitled Score Design for Music Reading: Cognitive and Artistic Perspectives. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and is also a guitarist.
Projects
Selected Publications
- Watch this space: primitive visual cues enhance sight-reading accuracy Musicae Scientiae (2026)
- Interpersonal neural synchrony in joint music-making and conversation: toward an integrative Marr-level account PsyArXiv (2025)
- Intersubjectivity in performance The Music Performer's Lived Experiences (2025)
- Jazz Trio Database: Automated timing annotation of jazz piano trio recordings processed using audio source separation Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (2024)
- Rhythmic qualities of jazz improvisation predict performer identity and style in source-separated audio recordings Royal Society Open Science (2024)
- Singers' realizations of linguistic tone in Chaozhou song Ethnomusicology (2024)
- Trade-offs in coordination strategies for duet jazz performances subject to network delay and jitter Music Perception (2024)
- Expression of antenatal symptoms of common mental disorders in The Gambia and the UK BMJ Open (2023)
- Music in the digital age: commodity, community, communion AI & Society (2023)
- Perception of rhythmic agency for conversational labeling Human-Computer Interaction (2023)
- Perspectives on musical care throughout the life course: Introducing the Musical Care International Network Musicae Scientiae (2023)
- Sharing uncertainty: Music in humanistic and scientific understandings Musicae Scientiae (2023)
- Task-irrelevant auditory metre shapes visuomotor sequential learning Psychological Research (2023)
- A functional magnetic resonance imaging examination of audiovisual observation of a point-light string quartet using intersubject correlation and physical feature analysis Frontiers in Neuroscience (2022)
- Back to basics: A re-evaluation of the relevance of imprinting in the genesis of Bowlby's attachment theory Frontiers in Psychology (2022)
- Music, memory and narrative: The art of telling in Tale of Tales Animation (2022)
- Reconsidering empathy: An interpersonal approach and participatory arts in the medical humanities The Medical/Health Humanities-Politics, Programs, and Pedagogies (2022)