Interaction

Ian Cross Juan Pablo Robledo Michelle Phillips Jason Taylor Neta Spiro David Duncan

MUSIC, CULTURE AND SOCIALITY

Ian Cross and his collaborators are involved in ongoing research projects that aim to explore music experimentally in naturalistic contexts, a major preoccupation being with the dynamics and effects of music as an interactive medium.

A project involving Ian, Juan Pablo Robledo (Universite de Lorraine), Michelle Phillips (RNCM) and Jason Taylor (University of Manchester) is following up the results of Robledo et al. (2021), which showed that a brief spontaneous bout of musical interaction led to an increased prevalence of markers of affiliation in subsequent conversations. The current project applies dual-EEG (hyperscanning) to explore how the neural activity of non-experts making music together may be modulated by that experience, aiming to elucidate commonalities in the cognitive processes underlying spontaneous interaction in speech and music.

  • Robledo, J. P., Hawkins, S., Cornejo, C., Cross, I., Party, D., & Hurtado, E. (2021). Musical improvisation enhances interpersonal coordination in subsequent conversation: Motor and speech evidence. PLOS ONE, 16(4), e0250166. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250166
  • Robledo, J-P, Taylor, J., Cross, I., Phillips, M. & Kearney, J. (2025). Interpersonal neural synchrony in joint music-making and conversation: toward an integrative Marr-level account. PsyArXiv: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/udwpb_v1

A parallel experimental track (involving Ian, Neta Spiro and David Duncan), explores the forms and social functions of non-expert, spontaneous music-making, aiming to conduct experiments as far as possible “in the wild” outside the laboratory.

In a personal project, Ian is exploring the ways in which the interactive and affiliative communicative medium that is participatory music relates to the means of managing societal order in different cultures that are interpretable as law.