MUSIC, MIND & BRAIN

Research on music learning during childhood is heavily centred around traditional music training with a focus on how children learn instruments and process pitch and rhythm. How children come to understand musical expression is less commonly explored. While we know that children can discriminate musical emotions, we can’t fully explain how they learn to do this at such an early stage in development or how individual differences in this ability influence wider music learning. This project investigates how embodied representations of emotional expression and cross-modal processing of emotional information, necessary for interpreting emotion cues of music, expressive movement and fictional stories, contribute to this area of musical learning.