Research Impact is a series that pulls back the curtain of IU Research, showcasing the faculty creating, innovating and advancing knowledge that improves communities and changes lives.
Goldman, an assistant professor of music theory and cognitive science in the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, studies the intersection between the theoretical and experimental, how we think, how we learn and, ultimately, how we interact with music.
Question: What is your current research focus?
Answer: In the Music and Mind Lab, we pursue interdisciplinary investigations into musical thought and perception. Recently, I’ve been using electroencephalography, or EEG, to focus on improvisation. I’ve also done projects on syntax in music as well as the perception of contour and melody, the perception of musical form and embodiment, and various other topics within music cognition, including some recent studies of musical timing perception with Music and Mind Lab co-director Dr. Peter Miksza.
My theoretical work is concerned with thinking about how music cognition fits in with other kinds of musical inquiry and asking questions like, “What does science have to contribute to our understanding of musical experience?” or “Why might we wish to appeal to neuroscience, for instance, to explain musical capacities given the other disciplinary alternatives that there are?”
Q: How does your work intersect with other research?
A: I operate on this implicit feeling that there are fewer questions than there are disciplines. Cognitive science itself is an interdisciplinary field that involves artificial intelligence and computer science and psychology and neuroscience — not to mention the many disciplinary perspectives from humanistic work on music. Any question that we would ask about the musical mind is going to bring forward this wide variety of disciplinary attitudes.
Q: How did you start in this area?
A: I went to university to study music, piano in particular, and didn’t seriously consider another career path. But my friends were studying neuroscience and showing me these interesting experiments, and I thought that looked pretty cool. So I started studying neuroscience too, and I graduated with two undergraduate degrees: one in neuroscience and one in piano.
When I went to graduate school, I studied music cognition, and I bounced back and forth between the two, being the scientist in a room full of humanists and the humanist in a room full of scientists.
Q: What excites you most about your work?
A: I am looking forward to developing and integrating the humanist and scientist parts of me. I believe work on this integration is what I am best poised to contribute to the field. I’ve written a few articles specifically about these topics, and I’m excited to do more about it.
One other thing that really excites me is writing songs about the process. I write about things that are going on in my research life and otherwise. They are often satirical, but not always. I’ve even written a musical, called “Science! The Musical,” which addresses a lot of these issues of interdisciplinarity in musical form.
Q: Has your musical ever been produced?
A: Twice: once in Cambridge, U.K., and once in New York at Columbia University. “Science! The Musical” follows the story of Janice, a first-year Ph.D. student who just had her first paper accepted to an academic conference. The only problem is she hasn’t written the paper yet, so she needs to learn how to do a scientific experiment before the conference begins.
Meanwhile, her professor is encouraging her to be interdisciplinary, and at the same time, a publishing kingpin is advising her that without publishing early, she’ll never have a career in science. If that wasn’t enough, her post-doc mentor has become cynical and jaded about how physicists treat social psychology as a soft science. And that he’ll never have his papers published in one of the true journals like Reality (instead, only the Journal of Coincidences), so he’s frustrated about that.
Janice learns how to do statistics and use SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). She learns about experimental design — through the song, of course! — and creates a questionnaire.
Q: What was it like to produce a musical?
A: I will say that producing a musical with a director and actors was genuinely the most fulfilling creative activity in my life. The term interdisciplinary is thrown around a lot these days. It seems to mean different things in different contexts. But I felt like theater is something that felt truly interdisciplinary in the sense that people were contributing skills and talents and insights all their own — the result being more than the sum of its parts.
Q: What are you working on next?
A: I’m currently working on an IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship project on contingency in music cognition: How does current music theoretical scholarship influence scientific work, and how does the technological context of musicians shape their musical cognitive processes?
Additionally, I’m working now on a neuroscience experiment on whether listeners can consciously change how they listen to certain harmonies. I’m also working on a piece comparing human songwriting with AI-generated songs, emphasizing the social aspects of songwriting.
Music will always be a form of expression, even if our social environments and technology change, and I believe it is a special form of human communication poised to bring people together and better understand ourselves.