Sound is my first language.

Graduated from the University of New South Wales in 1994 with a Bachelor of Music and a Bachelor of Education, specialising in performance and music education. Music has never left: it has been the through-line linking education, my own performing, and now the academic work on music perception.

The research and the performance feed each other. Knowing what a chord change does to a listener's heart rate informs how a phrase is shaped on stage. Understanding the live experience from inside informs what is worth measuring in the lab.

• B.Mus.
  Performance and Education, UNSW 1994
• B.Ed.
  Music Education, UNSW 1994
• Tutor
  School of Psychology, UoW
• Active
  30+ years performing
• ORCID
  0000-0003-3617-7994

The PhD work is explicitly about music. Heart rate variability and EEG measured during music listening. Autonomic responses to unexpected rhythm. Skin conductance and musical complexity. The body's involuntary reactions to musical structure are not metaphor, they are physiology, and they are measurable.

This is the unusual loop: a working musician runs the experiments on what happens to musicians and listeners. The disciplines reinforce one another, and the results are starting to suggest that we have under-estimated how deeply music engages the autonomic nervous system.

• PhD topic
  Cardiovascular measures of cognition in music listening
• Methods
  HRV, EEG/ERP, EDA, controlled musical stimuli
• Related
  Research detail →