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NEMuR 7: A Day of Interdisciplinarity and Collaboration

Posted on by Aliyah Ramatally

Written by Aliyah Ramatally, Elizabeth Galbo & Joshua Schlichting On Friday 11th of November, the Durham University Music and Science Lab hosted the 7th biannual meeting of the Northern Network for Empirical Music Research (NEMuR 7) at Van Mildert College, Durham, where participants from seven member institutions across Northern England gathered in-person and online. As … Continue reading NEMuR 7: A Day of Interdisciplinarity and Collaboration

An Interdisciplinary Gathering: Attending the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Society for Education and Music Psychology Research (SEMPRE)

Posted on by Thomas Anthony Graves

This weekend (2nd-4th September 2022), I was glad to attend the 50th anniversary conference of the Society for Education and Music Psychology Research (SEMPRE). Set in the imposing Senate House of the University of London, delegates gathered for two days of discussion and presentation of the latest research in music & science/music education, as well … Continue reading An Interdisciplinary Gathering: Attending the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Society for Education and Music Psychology Research (SEMPRE)

A New Variant of Conference: highlights from SysMus21

Posted on by Thomas Magnus Lennie

Back to face-to-face conferences? Well… not quite. A hybrid conference that is going to shape the way future conferences are run? Definitely. Nonetheless, the opportunity to meet and greet with those wonderful scholars from the world of music science without my pyjamas on was a welcome change to the last year. The student run conference, … Continue reading A New Variant of Conference: highlights from SysMus21

Separating the Cultural from the Universal in Harmony Perception 

Posted on by Imre Lahdelma

Some two years ago, I asked the question in the Music & Science blog series whether the perception of consonance and dissonance is universal. While the world has well and truly changed since then, pandemics aside these past two years have been fruitful for the Music & Science Lab in terms of new research into … Continue reading Separating the Cultural from the Universal in Harmony Perception 

Examining a PhD thesis

Posted on by Tuomas Eerola

We try to give advice to our doctoral students about how to prepare for the PhD examination. These instructions (link), training events (link), and mock examinations are useful orientations for the pinnacle of doctoral students’ careers, but describing the process from the other side of the table, from the examiner’s point of view, is what … Continue reading Examining a PhD thesis

New MA Specialism in Music and Science

Posted on by Kelly Jakubowski

Authors: Tuomas Eerola & Kelly Jakubowski We are very pleased to be launching a new pathway in Music and Science within our Taught Masters (MA) programme in Durham’s Music Department from Autumn 2021. In this post we outline some of the key features of the programme, and our views on what makes it unique and … Continue reading New MA Specialism in Music and Science

The two (or more) hats of a music psychologist: Communicating research to different disciplinary audiences

Posted on by Kelly Jakubowski

This post picks up on a recurring theme I’ve written about a couple times now, which is the unique challenges one faces when working in an area that falls ‘between’ traditional disciplines. Some of the challenges that arise in music psychology may be due to the fact that it is a relatively less ‘established’ discipline; … Continue reading The two (or more) hats of a music psychologist: Communicating research to different disciplinary audiences

Research in Lockdown: challenges, adaptions, & looking to the future

Posted on by Thomas Magnus Lennie

Written by Annaliese Micallef-Grimaud @LieseGrimaud & Thomas Magnus Lennie @lennie_tm Everyone has felt the impact of COVID-19 and lockdown in different ways and similarly there have been substantial differences in the ways people have adapted to keep their work progressing. The different stages at which individuals were in their research projects at the time of … Continue reading Research in Lockdown: challenges, adaptions, & looking to the future

The first woman to be awarded PhD at Durham was music psychologist

Posted on by Tuomas Eerola

In 1936, Clara Robertson, who was 28 years old at the time, was the first woman to defend her doctoral thesis at Durham University. The title boldly stated "The psychology of musical appreciation: an analysis of the bases and nature of the experience of listening to music", and her examiners, Dr C. S. Myers and … Continue reading The first woman to be awarded PhD at Durham was music psychologist

Investigating the psychology of live music in the field: Student-led projects at CTM 2020, Berlin

Posted on by Annaliese Micallef Grimaud

This year, a group of undergraduate students attending the 3rd year Psychology of Music module had the opportunity to conduct their empirical projects within the framework of an exciting international research programme in collaboration with another group of students from the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany). Supervised by Dr Liila … Continue reading Investigating the psychology of live music in the field: Student-led projects at CTM 2020, Berlin