"Intersubjectivity and Imaginative Responses to Music"
Dr. Elizabeth Margulis, Princeton University
Monday, November 28th at 5:30 p.m., Virtual Talk (Zoom)
About Dr. Margulis
Dr. Margulis is a Professor at Princeton University,
where she directs the Music Cognition Lab. Her research approaches music from the
combined perspectives of music theory/musicology and cognitive science. Her book On Repeat:
How Music Plays the Mind (Oxford University Press) received the 2014 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory,
and the 2015 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Her latest book The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford University Press) was published in 2018 and has been translated into Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese,
and is forthcoming in Chinese, Arabic, and Thai. Her co-edited book The Science-Music Borderlands:
Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future, is forthcoming with MIT Press.
Her cross-cultural research on narrative perceptions of music is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
She has been a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar.
She is Past President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC), and has served on the
Board of Directors and as Treasurer. She has also served on the Executive Board of the Society for Music Theory (SMT).
Her work has been featured in media outlets ranging from NPR (Science Friday and All Things Considered) to the BBC.
She has a B.M. in piano performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Veda Kaplinsky,
and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Before coming to Princeton, she was Distinguished Professor at the University of
Arkansas. She has also served as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, UK and as a faculty member
at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.
Abstract
Recent work using music highlights how past experiences and the immediate perceptual environment can shape imagination. Since music readily evokes imaginings and unfolds dynamically in time, it provides an opportunity to study how real time changes in a stimulus dynamically shape the time course of an imagined episode. Because aspects of past experiences can be shared, depending on culture, as can the immediate perceptual environment, imaginings that might seem idiosyncratic or entirely subjective can actually be broadly shared. This paper explores that intersubjectivity, its limits, and the repercussions for cognitive science more broadly.
Suggested Readings
Margulis, E. H., Williams, J., Simchy-Gross, R., & McAuley, J. D. (2022). When did that happen? The dynamic unfolding of perceived musical narrative. Cognition, 226, 105180. [.pdf]
Margulis, E. H., Wong, P., Turnbull, C., Kubit, B. M., & McAuley, J. D. (2022). Narratives imagined in response to instrumental music reveal culture-bounded intersubjectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(4). [.pdf]