Music

NICO LMC research on music encompasses the range from humanities to life sciences and engineering.

The Music Cognition Program led by Ric Ashley and Bob Gjerdingen brings together faculty and students involved in research on the cognitive representation and processing of music, including musical style, expressive performance, memory for music, and creativity.

Maud Hickey's activities in music technology and education include outreach to Chicago area schools through the Partnership for the Arts Program. Auditory Neuroscience (Kraus) and Speech Research (Wong) laboratories make Northwestern a major center for work in neuromusicology. Projects include:

• the neural encoding of music
• the neurophysiologic responses of instrumentalists with different listening biographies
• the effects of musical experience on the ability to learn lexical tone systems.

Bev Wright and other members of the Psychoacoustics Laboratory seek ways to train people to better hear subtle changes in pitch and rhythm.

The Interactive Audio Lab, headed by Bryan Pardo works on artificial intelligience and human-computer interactions, including search engines for music databases, machine accompaniment of human musicians, and separation of sound sources in a stereo mix.