Скачать или смотреть CMBS Faculty Talk fr. Dr. Andrew Goldman

The USC Center for Music, Brain, and Society hosted Dr. Andrew Goldman on Friday 2/28/25 where he discussed the application of neuroscience in music research. More on his talk and himself below.

Neuroscience in Music Research: Critical Challenges and Contributions

Neuroscientific accounts of music-theoretical topics are increasingly prominent. It is important to critically examine the challenges and contributions of incorporating neuroscience into music studies. Such examination allows for more meaningful integration and leads to better designed experiments that are appropriately sensitive to the historical and cultural situated- ness of the topics they investigate. Here I discuss three contributions and three challenges. The contributions are mechanistic explanations (which identify entities and activities that carry out musical behaviors), com- parison (which can unite or distinguish between apparently different or similar behavioral capacities), and the ability to transfer knowledge across domains of inquiry. The challenges are the problem of defining behavior (musical behaviors are underdefined, complicating the attribution of neural data), reverse inference (a logical fallacy complicating the association between neurophysiology and a musical task), and problems from issues of cognitive ontology (i.e., a set of fundamental cognitive capacities). Following this theoretical discussion, I apply the six ideas to recent work on improvisation and syntax (including my own), analyzing the work’s value and pitfalls. A final emergent theme from this critical analysis is that music neuroscience makes its best contributions when synthesizing work from other areas of music studies.

Biography
Andrew Goldman is a music theorist and cognitive scientist, and is currently Assistant Professor in Music Theory and Cognitive Science at Indiana University, where he also directs IU's Music and Mind Lab. He received his PhD in 2015 at the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge. He was in the inaugural cohort of Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University, and also held a postdoctoral position with the Music, Cognition, and the Brain initiative at Western University before joining the faculty at Indiana University. His research considers how we can (and cannot) use scientific methods to learn about musical perception and cognition in theory, and he also designs and conducts behavioral and neuroscientific experiments on music perception and cognition. Goldman's research has focused on improvisation in music and dance, and more recent work has addressed the perception of musical form, melodic contour, metrical perception, and embodiment in music. His work has been published in both music and psychology journals, and has been presented at national and international conferences including the Society for Music Theory, the International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, and the American Psychological Association. Goldman is also a pianist and composer. His original musical, "Science! The Musical" provides an alternate platform to explore the worlds of music and science. Musical numbers include "The Interdisciplinary Rag," "The Real World," "Publish or Perish," and more!