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
Research in Lockdown: challenges, adaptions, & looking to the future
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
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
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
On the science of mind-wandering and how music can contribute to it
Our minds are travelling all the time: at work, in class, while commuting, even when making love (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). The urge to escape the present moment is so pressing that many of us decide to invest considerable amount of time and money in training our brains to mindfulness, in the hope of cracking the … Continue reading On the science of mind-wandering and how music can contribute to it
The reviewing process: deal with it!
It is not often that we get to write in a free, unrestricted manner in academia as for example in a blog. Usually, everything and anything we write, whether it be a paper for a journal, a conference presentation, or a departmental seminar talk, is weighted, measured, and, as it is sometimes the case, it … Continue reading The reviewing process: deal with it!
Open Data in Music and Science
We have all heard about the replication crisis in psychology. It is not that the research ideas or methods themselves are flakey but selective analysis and reporting as well as insufficient details are making the past findings difficult to replicate (see also the discussion at the end of one of the rare replication studies in … Continue reading Open Data in Music and Science
Inside a String Quartet
Researchers at the Music and Science Lab have enjoyed a unique collaboration with BBC Radio 3 and musicians from the Royal Northern Sinfonia. The BBC’s Free Thinking festival, broadcast live from the Sage Gateshead, features the fruits of this collaboration, as we discuss analysis of the performances of two string quartet movements by Sophie Appleton … Continue reading Inside a String Quartet
What is an impact of an article? (Part II)
As described in Part I (What is an impact of an article?), there are several ways of assessing the merits of an article. Article-level metrics avoid some of the problems associated with the publication forums and the costs involved in expert evaluations, but these do introduce other dilemmas worth discussing. An article may sometimes be cited for reasons … Continue reading What is an impact of an article? (Part II)
What is an impact of an article? (Part I)
We all strive to do and publish high quality research and most of us think we know such work when reading it, but how do we collectively gauge the quality of journal articles? And why should we try to weigh scholarly outputs anyway? Well, such appraisal might be attractive and useful when describing the overall … Continue reading What is an impact of an article? (Part I)
Music & Science Lab 