Steven A B Wright

Music is an incredibly powerful retrieval cue. What is the neural basis of music-evoked memory reactivation? And how does this reactivation relate to later memory for the retrieved events? In our new study, we used Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to find out. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Comment: Musk’s tolerance of racism on X fuelled UK riots Court revelations highlight how Musk's platform enabled and profited from spreading racial hatred

There is a strong case that Musk has been the most important amplifier and ally of racial hatred in our country of anybody alive. It is a product of both his acts and his omissions. Very few people could compete with him in doing quite so much for racist reach
www.easterneye.biz/elon-musk-to...

Enjoyed attending Marcus Pearce’s book launch earlier, and picking up a signed copy.

David Huron Obituary (1954 - 2025) - Legacy Remembers View David Brian Huron's obituary, send flowers and sign the guestbook.

www.legacy.com/us/obituarie...

🚨New study alert!🚨 Our very own @michaelschutz.bsky.social and colleague @tuomaseerola.bsky.social developed a computational model that extracts 'relative mode', opening doors for studying musical emotion.🤖🎶
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

@musicpsychologylab.bsky.social #musicscience

Just a short clip from a brilliant behind the scenes video of how, when, where and why our new album, Elgar's The Kingdom, was recorded and our conductor @datconductor.bsky.social 's encyclopedic knowledge of it all. 🎶
You can watch the full video on our YouTube channel...
youtu.be/mm9ISHfbPVY?...

Sir David Attenborough: A life in music Look back through the Archive to discover how sound and music have shaped the life and career of one of the UK’s favourite TV personalities.

(From this BBC piece) canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/attenborough...

David Attenborough requesting alcohol for Alan Lomax.

#musicscience

Precursors of music and language in animals AbstractLanguage and music are universal human traits, raising the question of their evolutionary origin. This chapter takes a comparative perspective to a

Finally online! (For the moment still behind a paywall, but see also doi.org/10.31234/osf...) doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...

Great idea. All hot button topics.

YouTube video by A Krause Krause & Moles (2025). Defining a musician stereotype? Paper presented at SEMPRE2025.

if you missed our #SEMPRE #MusicScience consideration of a prevailing musician stereotype using an amended version of the DAST, we've got our recorded presentation on youtube --> www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWVO...

cc @anthonymoles.bsky.social

Theoretical and empirical advances in understanding musical rhythm, beat and metre Nature Reviews Psychology - Rhythmic elements including beat and metre are integral to human experiences of music. In this Review, Snyder and colleagues discuss leading theories of rhythm...

ICYMI, we published this review about a year ago on musical rhythm, beat, and meter. We focused especially on oscillator and predictive coding theories, and also discussed developmental and genetic findings.

rdcu.be/dHjO2

#music #neuroscience #genetics #psychology #cognition #development

Here it is our new preprint on neural encoding of musical expectations in newborns!

in collaboration with B. Toth & I. Winkler's hungrain team and @giacomonovembre.bsky.social 's NPAlab

check it out 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#musicscience #Neuroscience #MusicCognition #Neurodevelopment

Our study is now out in @naturecomms.bsky.social! Here, we integrate large-scale registry musicality data from twins to investigate the genetics of music enjoyment 🧬🎶🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Title page and abstract for my draft book, "Comparative Musicology The Science of the World’s Music" Abstract: Why do all human societies make music, but in such different ways? Scientific attempts to answer this question through cross-cultural comparison stalled during the 20th century and have only recently begun to make a resurgence. In this book, a leader in this resurgence synthesizes recent advances from musicology and related fields including psychology, linguistics, computer science, and evolutionary anthropology to outline ways to understand and compare all the world’s music. He applies comparative musicology to longstanding debates about universal and culturally-specific aspects of human music; evolutionary relationships between song, speech, and animal vocalisation; and applications to areas including music copyright, 2nd language acquisition, social bonding, and cultural heritage revitalisation. In doing so, he argues for an inclusive, multidisciplinary field that uplifts traditionally marginalised voices and combines the qualitative methods traditionally employed by musicologists and cultural anthropologists with quantitative methods from the natural sciences. The chapters are designed to be readable/teachable on their own, and the book includes a simplified tutorial (Ch. 2) and historical overview (Ch. 3) so that it can be appreciated by anyone from undergraduate students to senior professors, without requiring any specialised background knowledge (previous knowledge of music notation, ethnomusicology, statistics, biology, etc. are not required).

Figure 1.1. A figure showing relationships among 5 key areas outlined in our article “Toward a new comparative musicology” (Savage & Brown, 2013). (Figure adapted from Savage & Brown, 2013, 2014 and Savage et al., 2012; cartoon drawing of dancing/singing musicians by my wife, Sawa Matsueda Savage.)

Figure 0.1. Adaptation of my summary figure for efficiently reading/writing academic research (Savage, 2024) applied specifically to reading this book.

Figure 1.2. A simplified timeline of 15 key publications in the history of comparative musicology (right side) alongside relevant historical events (left side). The full history is outlined in Chapter 3 (“History), with many publications also reappearing repeatedly in other chapters.

I received a grant to publish my book on comparative musicology open access with Oxford University Press. This also means I can share the entire draft book as a preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
I'm still finalising (especially figures and the tutorial in Ch. 2), so would love feedback!

Interesting and surprising result.

I hope I can join online. Will joining instructions be shared nearer the time?

Music to boost your mood New research shows music can lift the mood of listeners who are feeling low, and researchers want to better understand how listening to music can boost wellbeing.

thanks to JCU's media release (www.jcu.edu.au/news/release...) on our #MusicScience paper (www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...), i got to have a fun chat on ABC QLD radio yesterday. looking forward to being beamed out to the NT later today! 📻

Opening the black box

Congratulations to Rebecca Jane Scarratt who successfully defended her PhD on 'Global and individual effects of music on relaxation and sleep' at @musicinthebrain.bsky.social last week. Thanks to the assessment committee for facilitating a really inspiring discussion of the work!

I’m not sure many people would take out a Spotify subscription just to listen to it.

I’ve been adding groups to this starter pack for #musicscience labs as I’ve found them.

If there are any that I’ve missed drop them in the comments!

go.bsky.app/Eao5vcf

William Knibb - Wikipedia

200 years ago today, on 16th February 1825, William Knibb (my first cousin 6 times removed) arrived in Jamaica. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...

Hello! For my PhD at the @musicinthebrain.bsky.social we are conducting an online survey on music for sleep. 🎶💤
Click on the link if you’re more than 18 and listen to music for sleep! It takes around 15 minutes ☀️

survey.au.dk/LinkCollecto...

Thank you!

#musicscience
@lullabyte.bsky.social

“Psychotic types” 😀

So I watched the Bob Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, and saw Alan Lomax having a fight.

Audiences, Publics, Experience: Rethinking Music Reception This conference aims to progress foundational research on music reception today, to deepen our understanding of musical experience, and to establish a new interdisciplinary framework.

Looking forward to being part of this fresh look at audience research and music reception. Free to attend thanks to funding from @britishacademy.bsky.social - more details to follow soon.

www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/briti...

Auditory Rhythm Encoding during the Last Trimester of Human Gestation: From Tracking the Basic Beat to Tracking Hierarchical Nested Temporal Structures Rhythm perception and synchronization to periodicity hold fundamental neurodevelopmental importance for language acquisition, musical behavior, and social communication. Rhythm is omnipresent in the f...

Cool #musicscience #neuroskyence alert:
Auditory Rhythm Encoding during the Last Trimester of Human Gestation: From Tracking the Basic Beat to Tracking Hierarchical Nested Temporal Structures
www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

Visualisation of search frequency of 213 affect terms, term similarities and clustering solution for 88 prominent terms, and the terms positioned within the affective circumplex space

What emotions does music express? Through 3 experiments with association tasks & context-based activities with 5000+ participants & 600+ affect terms, we report structures that differ from music-induced emotions such as romantic, in love, free, & festive #musicscience doi.org/10.1371/jour...