Finally out! Do musicians have better short-term memory than nonmusicians? This is what we investigated in a multilab that joined together 33 research units from 15 different countries.

Finally, our 4-year long project has been published! We have conducted a multi-lab study comparing STM of musicians and nonmusicians, collecting many other cognitive, personality, musical, and demographic variables! A big thank you to all collaborators! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

HUGE multi-lab study (including ours!) looking at whether musicians have better short-term memory than non-musicians across different domains (musical, verbal, and visuospatial memory). Congratulations to all 110 collaborators worldwide! #musicpsych #psychscisky #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1177/2515...

🚨New publication alert🚨 Latest consonance research coming from our lab had participants from India & UK rate how "tense" they found different harmonic intervals.🧵 below detailing insights! Not going to spoil surprising results here! #musicpsych #musician #psych www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Fantastic and fun #musicpsych discussions happening all around!! 🥳🥳

🎉🎉🎉 @kellyjakubowski.bsky.social connecting up with @musicpsychleeds.bsky.social to present ongoing research from our lab!! Cool stuff 😎

Which memorisation techniques help young piano students perform their best? PhD @charasteliou.bsky.social presented at #ISPS25 in Shanghai, showing that multimodal memorisation goes beyond repetition exercises in a pedagogical intervention study. #musicscience #psychology #MusicSky #musiciansky

🌀 Still time to submit to our international symposium! 📍 Durham University | 18–19 May 2026 🗓️ Submissions close 4 Nov 2025 musicinmyhead.org/network-acti...

Lab member @fruzsiszucs.bsky.social has written about her recent experience going to her first international conference at musicscience.net! #musicpsychology #earlycareerresearcher #psychology #conference #ICMPC18

Honoured to have had Dr. Amanda Krause (@studylistening.bsky.social) join the lab on her visit from Australia! Great to hear about her work and discuss future #musicscience collaboration between @durham-university.bsky.social and @jcuofficial.bsky.social 😎

🚨NEW BLOG🚨 “Conferences, huh. What’s the point?” @hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social @katiesvish.bsky.social & @kirtsconnor.bsky.social reflect on this conference season and why we bother going to conferences anyway. #musicscience #ICMPC18 #blog #phdlife #phd musicscience.net/2025/08/13/c...

Coldplay, Radiohead or R.E.M. – which band has changed their music the most over the years? Professor Nick Collins for our Department of Music has used computer analysis of music recordings to try and find the answer 🎸 👉🏼 www.durham.ac.uk/news-events/...

Great opportunity to present "Seeing Sound, Shaping Stories: The Role of Ideasthesia and Event Segmentation in Musically Evoked Narratives" at #ICMPC - the theoretical grounding for my @leverhulme.ac.uk project #musicscience

Had a blast 💥 at #ICMPC18 in São Paulo!! Super lucky for the opportunity to disseminate our research and engage with international colleagues! 🌏🌍🌎

@kirtsconnor.bsky.social gave a talk at #ICMPC18 on steps researchers can take to report their #measurement decisions and what questionable practices are common for the discipline #musicscience #psychometrics

Almost forgot @hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social poster highlight from #ICMPC18! Go check out the MUSIFEAST-17 stimulus set! #musicscience

@nashraa.bsky.social presenting on the final day of #ICMPC18 discussing her work on cross cultural rhythm perception 😮 #musicscience

Insights into the effectiveness of different memorisation techniques by @charasteliou.bsky.social!! #musicscience #musicpedagogy #musicteaching #ICMPC18

@fruzsiszucs.bsky.social gave a presentation at #ICMPC18 about how musical cues depict different concepts and their connection to specific memories! #musicscience

Been having some wonderful and really engaging discussions with many of the #ICMPC18 attendees this year in São Paulo! So lucky to be doing research in this field alongside such brilliant and thoughtful people 🧠💫 (P.S. this work is published! You can read it here: doi.org/10.1177/0305...)

Shout out to @katiesvish.bsky.social!!

@kirtsconnor.bsky.social gave a presentation on the content validity assessment for his music-emotion episode instrument! Out now as a preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... #musicscience #psychometrics

Another great presentation from @aliyaedwards.bsky.social!!

@curwen01.bsky.social gave a presentation at #ICMPC18 in São Paulo about her @leverhulme.ac.uk project connecting music-evoked narrative imaginings and synaesthesia! #musicscience

@hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social gave a presentation yesterday exploring the types of thoughts occurring while listening to music from a wide range of styles, familiarity, and more! Great to disseminate this @leverhulme.ac.uk project to the #musicscience crowd at #ICMPC18!!

Caroline Curwen, Seeing sound, shaping stories: The role of ideasthesia and event segmentation in musically evoked narratives Asking the Q, does synaesthesia magnify the ways we all naturally build stories from music? #ICMPC2025 #MusicScience

Neat design for a new test of musical imagery ability incorporating pitch and rhythm presented by @aliyaedwards.bsky.social at #ICMPC18 #musicscience

Postdoc @weiwu.bsky.social giving a presentation at #ICMPC18 on music evoked thoughts. Semantic similarity analysis showed that adjacent age groups share similar thoughts to the music! #musicscience

Excited to be at the first day of ICMPC18 in Brazil! #musicandscience @musicpsychologylab.bsky.social

Delighted to be in São Paulo seeing ICMPC 18 kick off, and excited to hear about all the fascinating music psychology research over the coming week! @musicpsychologylab.bsky.social

Then, we looked at how features of the different music clips predicted different thought types, like memories, fictional imaginings, and abstract imagery: doi.org/10.1177/0305....

The first two papers from the @leverhulme.ac.uk funded Music & Imagination project are now out, led by the fantastic @hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social! First, we built and validated a stimulus set of over 350 music clips varying in genre, familiarity, emotion, etc. doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Congrats to @hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social for the new article publication! Give it a read here: doi.org/10.1177/0305...

Had a great time presenting my work on chunking and memory, as well as the effect of cycle length in cross-cultural rhythm perception @rppw.bsky.social Both of these talks explored long and complex temporal patterns in North Indian classical Music. With: Martin Clayton & @tuomaseerola.bsky.social

New #musicscience publication out from @hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social 😎 If you need a music stimulus set give it a look!

@nashraa.bsky.social continues the conference presentation season @rppw.bsky.social @coe-mmbb.bsky.social!

Excited to announce that @sysmus.bsky.social in 2026 will be held in Durham @durhammusicdept.bsky.social @durham-university.bsky.social!!!!

@hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social presented her ongoing project on music-evoked thoughts at #SysMus25!!

Proud of @katiesvish.bsky.social @hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social @kirtsconnor.bsky.social & @nashraa.bsky.social representing the lab and @durhammusicdept.bsky.social with their presentations @sysmus.bsky.social #SysMus25 in @unioslo-ritmo.bsky.social 😎

'Thoughtscapes' - what types of thoughts emerge across different musical genres? A fascinating look at how music shapes the mind by @hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social #sysmus25

More important work from #SysMus25. @nashraa.bsky.social exploring the role of cultural familiarity and learning in the experience of isochronous & non-isochronous beats.

@katiesvish.bsky.social presented her current project which looks into differences between Western and Carnatic Musicians on Absolute Pitch Recognition #SysMus25 #musicscience

@nashraa.bsky.social gave a presentation today at #SysMus25!! Excited to see that familiarity, length and non-isochrony affects the temporal learning of North Indian Rhythms! #musicscience

Hazel & Connor recently represented @durham-university.bsky.social for @ukrepro.bsky.social's retreat, hosted by @lselibrary.bsky.social! They presented @reproducibilitea.org's new discipline-specific resources, using their interdisciplinary perspective in #MusicScience @durhammusicdept.bsky.social

Promo for @katiesvish.bsky.social PhD study!! Share or take part in this #musicscience project!

Congratulations to @curwen01.bsky.social for the recent feature by @leverhulme.ac.uk!! #musicscience happening at @durhammusicdept.bsky.social!!

Great to see our friends from @maplelab.bsky.social on Bluesky! Oh hey, already posting cool research too!

Want to measure how "major" or "minor" a musical passage feels on a sliding scale, not just as a simple label? 🤔 Mike Schutz and I refined the concept of 'relative mode', treating it as a continuous spectrum from minor to major. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #musicscience #MIR 1/3

Our Lab member @hazelvanderwalle.bsky.social has been working with @reproducibilitea.org to make reading lists for open research in the arts, including music research!! 🤓Check it out below!

Thanks to @aliyaedwards.bsky.social from @musicpsychologylab.bsky.social for this excellent guest blog post about the opportunities she’s been afforded by the Inner Music and Wellbeing network!