MY RESEARCH
I use music as a tool to study fundamental mechanisms of perception and action. How does the brain pick on musical regularities, anticipate the next note and respond to unexpected events? How are musical expectations linked pleasure? How do they inform motor control during performance and music learning? To answer these questions, I combine neuroimaging (fMRI, MEG, EEG, tDCS), computational modeling and behavioral (psychophysics, pupillometry) methods.
AUDITORY MEMORY
How does the brain detect and memorise patterns in sounds? And, are the underlying processes phylogenetically conserved? Even in distracted listeners across ages and cultures, music implicitly engages auditory and mnemonic brain sources likely evolved for general purposes of auditory scene analysis and sound anticipation. I link auditory-scene-motivated studies with music-motivated studies to investigate analogous brain and computational underpinnings of sound sequence tracking.
MUSICAL STRUCTURES AND PLEASURE
Why do we like music? The brain continously integrate musical expectations and sensory inputs during naturalistic musical listening. Thanks to this process, we intuitively know what event is likely to occur and when that will be, and we are surprised when our expectations are thwarted. It is hypothesised that an ideal balance between expected and unxpected events induces highest pleasure in listeners. I investigate this link. I further investigate how learning to play an instrument coukd be reinforced by like music.
MUSIC PRODUCTION
Do musicians speak with their hands? I investigate how precision and flexibility of music performance ultimately gain from reliable predictions about the structure of the music. Harmony not only structures the sequence of sounds but also co-determines how single musical acts are sequentially ordered. I use the musician's brain as a model system to study abstract structure-based predictions in action planning in jazz and classical performance.