The Music Lab
@themusiclab.org
We're a cognitive science lab at the University of Auckland and the Yale Child Study Center.
Participate in our research at themusiclab.org!
Participate in our research at themusiclab.org!
citizen scientists arrive on themusiclab.org from anywhere on the internet — welcome to the thousands of current participants visiting via vtuber Nimi Nightmare's new video 🙌🏻 🎧
@niminightmare.bsky.social
@niminightmare.bsky.social
Taking a Test to Find Out if I'm Actually Tone-Deaf
YouTube video by Nimi Nightmare
www.youtube.com
November 12, 2025 at 5:50 AM
citizen scientists arrive on themusiclab.org from anywhere on the internet — welcome to the thousands of current participants visiting via vtuber Nimi Nightmare's new video 🙌🏻 🎧
@niminightmare.bsky.social
@niminightmare.bsky.social
our latest music game, Rhythm Radar, is about how melodies and rhythms work together to make a perfect rhythmic fit 🥁🎶🧠
give it a try at themusiclab.org/quizzes/downbeat!
(this is a collab across Auckland Psych and Yale Cognitive Science, led by @mattsluke.bsky.social and Maxx Shearod)
give it a try at themusiclab.org/quizzes/downbeat!
(this is a collab across Auckland Psych and Yale Cognitive Science, led by @mattsluke.bsky.social and Maxx Shearod)
Rhythm Radar
Which rhythms fit best? Test your musical intuitions!
themusiclab.org
August 15, 2025 at 12:22 AM
our latest music game, Rhythm Radar, is about how melodies and rhythms work together to make a perfect rhythmic fit 🥁🎶🧠
give it a try at themusiclab.org/quizzes/downbeat!
(this is a collab across Auckland Psych and Yale Cognitive Science, led by @mattsluke.bsky.social and Maxx Shearod)
give it a try at themusiclab.org/quizzes/downbeat!
(this is a collab across Auckland Psych and Yale Cognitive Science, led by @mattsluke.bsky.social and Maxx Shearod)
Reposted by The Music Lab
New preprint from a bio-psych collab
many animals have preferences for sounds in their species (eg, I'm a frog, I like deeper frog croaks bc better frog mates sound deeper)
@loganjames.bsky.social tested if humans are sensitive to these prefs in 16 species
we are!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
many animals have preferences for sounds in their species (eg, I'm a frog, I like deeper frog croaks bc better frog mates sound deeper)
@loganjames.bsky.social tested if humans are sensitive to these prefs in 16 species
we are!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
June 27, 2025 at 7:40 PM
New preprint from a bio-psych collab
many animals have preferences for sounds in their species (eg, I'm a frog, I like deeper frog croaks bc better frog mates sound deeper)
@loganjames.bsky.social tested if humans are sensitive to these prefs in 16 species
we are!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
many animals have preferences for sounds in their species (eg, I'm a frog, I like deeper frog croaks bc better frog mates sound deeper)
@loganjames.bsky.social tested if humans are sensitive to these prefs in 16 species
we are!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by The Music Lab
my latest, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences
this review lays out what I think the fundamental specializations are for music perception in humans, namely, the hierarchical processing of pitch and rhythm
or, how our minds turn vibrating air into music
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lG9G_V1r-...
this review lays out what I think the fundamental specializations are for music perception in humans, namely, the hierarchical processing of pitch and rhythm
or, how our minds turn vibrating air into music
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lG9G_V1r-...
June 13, 2025 at 9:16 PM
my latest, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences
this review lays out what I think the fundamental specializations are for music perception in humans, namely, the hierarchical processing of pitch and rhythm
or, how our minds turn vibrating air into music
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lG9G_V1r-...
this review lays out what I think the fundamental specializations are for music perception in humans, namely, the hierarchical processing of pitch and rhythm
or, how our minds turn vibrating air into music
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lG9G_V1r-...
Reposted by The Music Lab
omg @steveinskeep.bsky.social has followed up on our Child Development paper doi.org/10.1111/cdev... by asking parents to send in recordings of them singing to their kids
they got 1000 submissions!! this is so cool
they got 1000 submissions!! this is so cool
We asked NPR listeners what they sing to their babies. Hear some of our favorites
After a new study confirmed singing to babies can help boost their health and happiness, we asked our listeners and readers what they sing to their little ones. Listen to some of our favorites.
www.npr.org
June 6, 2025 at 9:26 PM
omg @steveinskeep.bsky.social has followed up on our Child Development paper doi.org/10.1111/cdev... by asking parents to send in recordings of them singing to their kids
they got 1000 submissions!! this is so cool
they got 1000 submissions!! this is so cool
New research from us published in Child Development doi.org/10.1111/cdev... shows that singing to infants improves their overall mood.
Listen here on Morning Edition, where you can submit your own lullabies :)
Listen here on Morning Edition, where you can submit your own lullabies :)
Do you sing to your baby? NPR wants to know what songs you sing
A new study from Yale University finds that singing to babies improves their overall mood. NPR wants to know what songs our listeners sing to their babies.
www.npr.org
June 3, 2025 at 12:15 PM
New research from us published in Child Development doi.org/10.1111/cdev... shows that singing to infants improves their overall mood.
Listen here on Morning Edition, where you can submit your own lullabies :)
Listen here on Morning Edition, where you can submit your own lullabies :)
Reposted by The Music Lab
I really like the framing of music-in-infant-care as a contrast to Mozart Effect / 'music makes you smarter'. the first thing actually works whereas the second does not
we didn't frame our Child Development paper (doi.org/10.1111/cdev...) this way but Susan Pinker did in her WSJ piece (gift link):
we didn't frame our Child Development paper (doi.org/10.1111/cdev...) this way but Susan Pinker did in her WSJ piece (gift link):
Babies Don’t Need Mozart Recordings, Just a Parent Who Sings
The salutary effect of music on infants is more about happiness than smarts.
www.wsj.com
May 31, 2025 at 5:56 PM
I really like the framing of music-in-infant-care as a contrast to Mozart Effect / 'music makes you smarter'. the first thing actually works whereas the second does not
we didn't frame our Child Development paper (doi.org/10.1111/cdev...) this way but Susan Pinker did in her WSJ piece (gift link):
we didn't frame our Child Development paper (doi.org/10.1111/cdev...) this way but Susan Pinker did in her WSJ piece (gift link):
Reposted by The Music Lab
mums & dads!! we're looking for ~20 families to participate in a study like this one
if you have a baby (up to 4 months old) & live in AoNZ you are eligible. super fun, you get music, toys & $$, and also fancy graphs of your baby's data in the study
sign up at themusiclab.org/signup
if you have a baby (up to 4 months old) & live in AoNZ you are eligible. super fun, you get music, toys & $$, and also fancy graphs of your baby's data in the study
sign up at themusiclab.org/signup
Singing to babies boosts their mood and wellbeing, study shows
A new study shows singing to babies can actually boost their mood and wellbeing.
www.rnz.co.nz
May 29, 2025 at 10:40 PM
mums & dads!! we're looking for ~20 families to participate in a study like this one
if you have a baby (up to 4 months old) & live in AoNZ you are eligible. super fun, you get music, toys & $$, and also fancy graphs of your baby's data in the study
sign up at themusiclab.org/signup
if you have a baby (up to 4 months old) & live in AoNZ you are eligible. super fun, you get music, toys & $$, and also fancy graphs of your baby's data in the study
sign up at themusiclab.org/signup
Our latest in Child Development: singing to babies improves their mood, and not just while the singing is going on 👶🎶
Co-led by Eun Cho and @lidyay.bsky.social
Paper at doi.org/10.1111/cdev...
Co-led by Eun Cho and @lidyay.bsky.social
Paper at doi.org/10.1111/cdev...
May 28, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Our latest in Child Development: singing to babies improves their mood, and not just while the singing is going on 👶🎶
Co-led by Eun Cho and @lidyay.bsky.social
Paper at doi.org/10.1111/cdev...
Co-led by Eun Cho and @lidyay.bsky.social
Paper at doi.org/10.1111/cdev...
Reposted by The Music Lab
we just posted the Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, a corpus of audio & metadata. 1007 songs in many languages, for behavioral experiments, cross-cultural research, etc
preprint: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d2ftg_v1
corpus: zenodo.org/records/14927216
led by @milabertolo.bsky.social
1/
preprint: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d2ftg_v1
corpus: zenodo.org/records/14927216
led by @milabertolo.bsky.social
1/
![The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, aglobal corpus of vocal music
[author list]
AbstractA comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferencesabout the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, withmany available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstandinginterest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here,we report theExpanded Natural History of Song Discography, an open-access corpus of vocal music (n=1007 song excerpts), with accompanying metadata detailing each song’s region of origin, language (of 413languages represented here), and one of 10 behavioral contexts (e.g., work, storytelling, mourning, lullaby,dance). The corpus is designed to sample both broadly, with a large cross-section of societies and languages;and deeply, with many songs representing three well-studied language families (Atlantic-Congo, Austronesian,and Indo-European). This design facilitates direct comparison of musical and vocal features across cultures,principled approaches to sampling stimuli for experiments, and evaluation of models of the cultural evolutionof song. In this paper we describe the corpus and provide two proofs of concept, demonstrating its utility. Weshow that (1) the acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their behavioral contexts, including in previouslyunstudied contexts (e.g., children’s play songs); and (2) similarities in acoustic content of songs across culturesare predictable, in part, by the relatedness of those cultures.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:v6qwaqo24zfrq5fj7ceibxqk/bafkreih7a2u3rxrlera5bc5n3yk3lhde3zkvq37gnk7axyblgtnjothrhy@jpeg)
February 25, 2025 at 10:17 PM
we just posted the Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, a corpus of audio & metadata. 1007 songs in many languages, for behavioral experiments, cross-cultural research, etc
preprint: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d2ftg_v1
corpus: zenodo.org/records/14927216
led by @milabertolo.bsky.social
1/
preprint: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d2ftg_v1
corpus: zenodo.org/records/14927216
led by @milabertolo.bsky.social
1/
today we're welcoming many thousands of Morning Brew subscribers to The Music Lab, to play our Tone Guesser game!
thanks for the nice surprise @morningbrew.bsky.social, hope our servers can handle the traffic 😅
you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org/quizzes/toneguesser 🦋
thanks for the nice surprise @morningbrew.bsky.social, hope our servers can handle the traffic 😅
you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org/quizzes/toneguesser 🦋
January 29, 2025 at 9:56 PM
today we're welcoming many thousands of Morning Brew subscribers to The Music Lab, to play our Tone Guesser game!
thanks for the nice surprise @morningbrew.bsky.social, hope our servers can handle the traffic 😅
you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org/quizzes/toneguesser 🦋
thanks for the nice surprise @morningbrew.bsky.social, hope our servers can handle the traffic 😅
you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org/quizzes/toneguesser 🦋
hello world !!
despite some formerly lovely websites going down in flames we are still around doing science about music, language, and sound :)
you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org
despite some formerly lovely websites going down in flames
you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org
The Music Lab
We do citizen science to learn how the human mind creates and perceives music.
themusiclab.org
January 17, 2025 at 9:58 PM
hello world !!
despite some formerly lovely websites going down in flames we are still around doing science about music, language, and sound :)
you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org
despite some formerly lovely websites going down in flames
you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org