Steven A B Wright

Thrilled to share our new publication in Aesthetics, Creativity & the Arts! 🎶 Huge thanks to my wonderful collaborators for making this possible. Our paper explores how culture shapes emotions felt with favorite music and their implications for arts & health. Read it here: doi.org/10.1037/aca0...

Let Music Be Your Medicine Exploring ways to deliver rhythmic frequencies to improve memory.

Let Music Be Your Medicine | Exploring ways to deliver rhythmic frequencies to improve memory. Thanks
@psychologytoday.com for this writeup of our lab’s #musicscience for Alzheimer’s Disease @northeasternu.bsky.social @nuglobalnews.bsky.social www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/musi...

#musicscience

Flexible tapping synchronization in macaques: dynamic switching of timing strategies within rhythmic sequences | Journal of Neurophysiology | American Physiological Society The ability to synchronize bodily movements with regular auditory rhythm across a broad range of tempos underlies humans’ capacity for playing music and dancing. This capability is prevalent across hu...

Looks like macaques can entrain to a beat, if it’s visual. journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

Does anyone have any boring music for music for experiments?
I need music that people are unlikely to find absorbing.

#musicscience @musicpsychshef.bsky.social @musicpsychleeds.bsky.social @musicpsychologylab.bsky.social #aesthetics #musicpsych

New paper! Excellent work by Rebecca Jane Scarratt on the neural responses to relaxation music published in the journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. @musicinthebrain.bsky.social #Musicscience
link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Music and memory - WHYY Princeton professor Elizabeth Margulis explains why music has the power to affect our emotions, transport us to far away places and connect us to others.

🎶 Can music impact our memories?

@margulisa.bsky.social, director of The Music Cognition Lab at Princeton, joins @whyy.org to explain.

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