Please join us for our next Brown Bag speaker event of the semester on December 8, 12:30pm at LRW 4018. Dr. Lauren Fink will present a paper titled “From individual to social dynamics of musical engagement.”

Dr. Fink is a recent addition to the Department Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and LIVELab at McMaster University. She arrives from the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics where she was a Postdoctoral Researcher and the University of California, Davis where she completed a Ph.D.

As the principal investigator in the BEAT (Brain/Body Entertainment Attention & Timing) Lab, Dr. Fink’s cutting-edge research seeks to understand how is it that music moves us and bonds us so deeply? In this presentation, Dr. Fink will discuss the nervous system mechanisms, whether we can predict the effects any given piece of music will have on an individual, and can we use music to enhance social bonds or advocate for societal change.

Dr. Fink has provided the following abstract:

Music moves us—on individual and societal levels—but how? What are the nervous system mechanisms? Can we predict the effects any given piece of music will have on an individual? Can we use music to enhance social bonds or advocate for societal change? In this talk, I will attempt to answer these questions. First, I will provide an overview of my research using behavioural, psychophysical, and eye-tracking methodologies to study auditory attention in individual, laboratory contexts. I will then discuss efforts to study musical engagement in more naturalistic, social contexts. From assisting small groups in making music together with a custom-built adaptive device, to multi-person mobile eye-tracking during a live concert, the remainder of the talk will focus on current and future directions in my new lab at McMaster. Underlying the talk is a broad interest in timing, from auditory rhythm to interpersonal synchronization, and a desire to bridge levels of explanation.