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)

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...

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-...

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

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 :)

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):

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

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...

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/

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 🦋

hello world !! despite some formerly lovely websites going down in flames <cough, twitter> we are still around doing science about music, language, and sound :) you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org