I should add that this would not have happened without federal support from the National Science Foundation’s Career award which not only paid the participants, but also enabled the combined #psychology and #music major @northeasternu.bsky.social #psyscisky to grow #musicscience 🎹🧠

Kudos to the great @nickkathios.bsky.social & Ben Kubit for pushing this through, Ani Patel & Adam Tierney for bringing their 🪄, and the students for embarking on some publishable-quality work in my Music and the Brain course! #musicscience ftw 🙌

We think it’s because Laurel hearers are attend more to the low frequencies within speech, which also give rise to the song-like qualities of speech.
I also think it’s pretty cool to use these illusions as a way to understand individual differences in perception

but curiously 3) ppl who heard Laurel instead of Yanny in the famous Laurel-Yanny illusion were more like to perceive the speech-to-song transition.

Turns out 1) everyone dislikes the repeated speech more after repetition, 2) ppl w/ musical anhedonia didn’t change their ratings more than controls

We set out asking whether people with musical anhedonia might experience the speech to song illusion differently, and whether the speech to song illusion might be accompanied by any changes in liking, not just in musicality ratings.

The speech to song illusion, famously started when Diana Deutsch played herself saying “sometimes behave so strangely” on loop, describes the curious #musicscience phenomenon where speech seems to turn into song when repeated.

I read this aloud to @richardhwest.bsky.social and he says he now doesn’t believe the first part 😂😂😂🇸🇪🗄️💪

I should add that this work is funded in large part by taxpayers through NSF and NIH. Their support is crucial to our work towards innovative solutions to problems ranging from Alzheimer’s Disease to depression, anxiety, and ADHD. 💪

Also check out the precision gesturing by postdoc Ben Kubit on Earworms, Memory Consolidation, and Neural Replay for Recently Heard Music (very cool work he did @margulisa.bsky.social before joining my lab!)

@arun-asthagiri.bsky.social

Last but certainly not the least, @nickkathios.bsky.social on Finding the Self in Others' Music: Self and Other
Representations in Theory of Mind Network During Music Listening

Here’s Kaye Han: Joint Connectivity between Sensorimotor and Auditory-Reward
Networks During Resting State and Music Listening

Here’s Jinyu Wang: Brain Structural Predictors of Musical Reward Sensitivity in Older and Young Adults

Here’s Corinna Parrish: Effects of Theta-Band Amplitude Modulation on Sustained Attention