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Music Lab (UvA)

The Amsterdam Music Lab (AML) connects music science to the outside world with innovative designs for online experiments, audio processing, and psychometrics for understanding the diversity of the human musical experience.

The AML is part of the Music Cognition Group (MCG) of the department of Musicology, the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation and the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Centre. MCG applies interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, make, and appreciate music.

The research of the Music Cognition Group (MCG) has a special focus on the everyday listener, using theoretical, empirical and computational methods. The research program aims to identify the basic (neuro)cognitive mechanisms that constitute musicality (and effective ways to study these in human and nonhuman animals) and to develop methods to unravel the cognitive, biological and environmental mechanisms that underpin our capacity for music.

Research questions (2022-2025)

  1. What are the core cognitive components of musicality?
  2. What are the biological and environmental factors contributing to musicality?
  3. What computational mechanisms and neural networks underly temporal expectations?
  4. How does music differ from other sounds, such as language and environmental sounds?
  5. What do everyday listeners attend to when they listen to music?
  6. How to develop intrinsically motivating music listening games?

On the website (online since 1994!) you can read more about the research of the Music Cognition Group. 

Additional info

Image credits

Header image: Amsterdam Music Lab - UvA

Icon image: Amsterdam Music Lab - UvA