The Music Lab

Publishers Marketplace deal report: WHY WE HEAR WHAT WE HEAR By Samuel Mehr Non-fiction: Science/Technology March 3, 2026 Cognitive scientist and director of the Music Lab Samuel Mehr's WHY WE HEAR WHAT WE HEAR, an exploration of the cognitive and neuroscientific connections between music and human behavior, that demonstrates how musicality is a core component of the human mind, to Evan Hansen-Bundy at Bloomsbury, for publication in 2028, by Eric Simonoff at WME (NA).

uh, here goes nothing

Taking a Test to Find Out if I'm Actually Tone-Deaf YouTube video by Nimi Nightmare

citizen scientists arrive on themusiclab.org from anywhere on the internet — welcome to the thousands of current participants visiting via vtuber Nimi Nightmare's new video 🙌🏻 🎧
@niminightmare.bsky.social

Rhythm Radar Which rhythms fit best? Test your musical intuitions!

our latest music game, Rhythm Radar, is about how melodies and rhythms work together to make a perfect rhythmic fit 🥁🎶🧠

give it a try at themusiclab.org/quizzes/downbeat!

(this is a collab across Auckland Psych and Yale Cognitive Science, led by @mattsluke.bsky.social and Maxx Shearod)

Main panel of Fig 1 from paper in OP

New preprint from a bio-psych collab

many animals have preferences for sounds in their species (eg, I'm a frog, I like deeper frog croaks bc better frog mates sound deeper)

@loganjames.bsky.social tested if humans are sensitive to these prefs in 16 species

we are!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Trends in Cognitive Sciences Review Core systems of music perception Samuel A. Mehr 1 ,2 , * 1 School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Human musicality is supported by two distinct systems of representation: one for tonal perception, which contextualizes pitch input in reference to a hierarchy of tones; and one for metrical perception, which contextualizes temporal input in reference to a hierarchy of rhythmic groupings. Growing evidence suggests that the two systems are universal, automatic, encapsulated, and relatively early-developing. But like speech perception, and unlike several other perceptual systems, they appear to be uniquely human. The systems of tonal and metrical perception form a foundational structure for musicality that, when combined with the processing of other acoustical information (e.g., timbre or auditory scenes), and applied in conjunction with other cognitive domains, yields a human psychology of music.

my latest, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

this review lays out what I think the fundamental specializations are for music perception in humans, namely, the hierarchical processing of pitch and rhythm

or, how our minds turn vibrating air into music

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lG9G_V1r-...

We asked NPR listeners what they sing to their babies. Hear some of our favorites After a new study confirmed singing to babies can help boost their health and happiness, we asked our listeners and readers what they sing to their little ones. Listen to some of our favorites.

omg @steveinskeep.bsky.social has followed up on our Child Development paper doi.org/10.1111/cdev... by asking parents to send in recordings of them singing to their kids

they got 1000 submissions!! this is so cool

Do you sing to your baby? NPR wants to know what songs you sing A new study from Yale University finds that singing to babies improves their overall mood. NPR wants to know what songs our listeners sing to their babies.

New research from us published in Child Development doi.org/10.1111/cdev... shows that singing to infants improves their overall mood.

Listen here on Morning Edition, where you can submit your own lullabies :)

Babies Don’t Need Mozart Recordings, Just a Parent Who Sings The salutary effect of music on infants is more about happiness than smarts.

I really like the framing of music-in-infant-care as a contrast to Mozart Effect / 'music makes you smarter'. the first thing actually works whereas the second does not

we didn't frame our Child Development paper (doi.org/10.1111/cdev...) this way but Susan Pinker did in her WSJ piece (gift link):

Singing to babies boosts their mood and wellbeing, study shows A new study shows singing to babies can actually boost their mood and wellbeing.

mums & dads!! we're looking for ~20 families to participate in a study like this one

if you have a baby (up to 4 months old) & live in AoNZ you are eligible. super fun, you get music, toys & $$, and also fancy graphs of your baby's data in the study

sign up at themusiclab.org/signup

Abstract and paper from the link in OP

Our latest in Child Development: singing to babies improves their mood, and not just while the singing is going on 👶🎶

Co-led by Eun Cho and @lidyay.bsky.social

Paper at doi.org/10.1111/cdev...

The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, aglobal corpus of vocal music [author list] AbstractA comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferencesabout the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, withmany available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstandinginterest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here,we report theExpanded Natural History of Song Discography, an open-access corpus of vocal music (n=1007 song excerpts), with accompanying metadata detailing each song’s region of origin, language (of 413languages represented here), and one of 10 behavioral contexts (e.g., work, storytelling, mourning, lullaby,dance). The corpus is designed to sample both broadly, with a large cross-section of societies and languages;and deeply, with many songs representing three well-studied language families (Atlantic-Congo, Austronesian,and Indo-European). This design facilitates direct comparison of musical and vocal features across cultures,principled approaches to sampling stimuli for experiments, and evaluation of models of the cultural evolutionof song. In this paper we describe the corpus and provide two proofs of concept, demonstrating its utility. Weshow that (1) the acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their behavioral contexts, including in previouslyunstudied contexts (e.g., children’s play songs); and (2) similarities in acoustic content of songs across culturesare predictable, in part, by the relatedness of those cultures.

a figure from the paper with a world map, some phylogenetic trees, and a big heatmap

we just posted the Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, a corpus of audio & metadata. 1007 songs in many languages, for behavioral experiments, cross-cultural research, etc

preprint: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d2ftg_v1
corpus: zenodo.org/records/14927216

led by @milabertolo.bsky.social

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Tone Guesser is led by one of our fantastic postdocs (or 'research fellow' in kiwi English), @courtneybhilton.bsky.social, and is an experiment funded by the RSNZ's Marsden Fund @royalsocietynz.bsky.social

Morning Brew's To-Do List, including a link to themusiclab.org

today we're welcoming many thousands of Morning Brew subscribers to The Music Lab, to play our Tone Guesser game!

thanks for the nice surprise @morningbrew.bsky.social, hope our servers can handle the traffic 😅

you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org/quizzes/toneguesser 🦋

The Music Lab We do citizen science to learn how the human mind creates and perceives music.

hello world !!

despite some formerly lovely websites going down in flames <cough, twitter> we are still around doing science about music, language, and sound :)

you can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org