听
The annual Macnamara-Bregman Lecture is held in honor of the scientific and academic contributions of John Macnamara (1929-1996) and his friend Albert Bregman (1936-2023).
Help support the Macnamara-Bregman Lecture Series and Dr. Bregman's efforts maintaining this series by making a donation through .
To correctly allocate your gift, under Select or search area of support听please select "Other..." and copy-and-paste the听phrase,听"Macnamara听Fund, Department of Psychology", into the box labeled,听Provide instructions for your gift.
4 April 2025, 15h30-17h
Location: McMed 522
Dr. Samuel Mehr
Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology, University of Auckland, NZ
Associate Professor Adjunct, Child Study Center, Yale University, US
Title: Principles of Music Perception
Abstract: Like vocalizations found across the animal kingdom, music serves a basic communicative function in our species: it transmits information from the minds of people producing it to the minds of people hearing it. In this talk I will show first that the communicative properties of music are widespread, as it produces reliable psychological responses in listeners across cultures and across the lifespan. These findings suggest that human musicality is not an incidental outcome of cultural evolution, but instead forms a constituent part of our psychology, in a fashion comparable to other domains, like social cognition, number, and so on. Then, I will present ideas on the perceptual mechanisms that may enable music's communicative functions, focusing in particular on the automatic hierarchical representation of pitch and rhythm. These processing abilities appear to be universal, early-developing, and uniquely human, and they may be considered specialized components of human auditory scene analysis.