Rice opens doors for interdisciplinary students

A musician and a scientist
Rice opens doors for interdisciplinary students 

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

A concert violist by day, a neuroscientist by night and a professor somewhere in between. Those are superhero-style ambitions that Molly Gebrian is turning into reality at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Already an accomplished musician, Gebrian began her studies in the highly selective doctoral program at the music school this fall. But her musical abilities and accomplishments aren’t all she brought to Rice. She also plans to pursue a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience.

“I feel like society tries to pigeonhole people,” Gebrian said. “It wants me to say if I’m a musician or a scientist. Well, I’m both. I’m equally a musician and a scientist. Rice gets that.”

Gebrian first began to stroll down this dual path as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, where she double majored in neuroscience and viola. She focused on her music in the graduate program at the New England Conservatory of Music. But she missed science, so she signed up for an independent study, which cemented her determination to be both a musician and a scientist.

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The Shepherd School had always been on Gebrian’s short list, and Rice became her top choice when the university made it possible for her to pursue both doctoral degrees. The Shepherd School embraced her unconventional pursuit.

Gebrian found a home for her unique research interest in the university’s elite orchestral training program and its close relationship with the Texas Medical Center.

“Coming to Rice has opened a lot of doors for me,” Gebrian said. “Rice has given me a chance to do both the things I want to do. Before I moved here, I wasn’t convinced I had made the right decision. Within a week, I knew (I had). I was sitting on a bench on campus and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m really happy here.'”

Even happier

The happiness grew after a recent chance e-mail from a neuroscientist she had worked with when she was studying at the New England Conservatory.

Mark Tramo, director of the Institute for Music & Brain Science at Harvard, had been invited by Rice’s Anthony Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory, to take part in Exploring the Mind Through Music, a conference Brandt was organizing aimed at increasing the dialogue between musicians and scientists.

Tramo accepted the invitation and copied Gebrian on his response. Soon after the e-mail, Gebrian and Brandt sought each other out and a collaboration grew.

The conference, March 27-29, will bring together distinguished scientists, composers and musicians to discuss music’s role in human cognition and behavior. As part of the lead-up to the conference, Gebrian has been offering informal open classes about her research into the brain based on papers she authored during her time in graduate school.

“This is about using music as a way into the mind,” Gebrian said. Not only can the interdisciplinary research help scientists understand the brain, it can help musicians practice smarter and perform better.

One of the topics Gebrian has explored is how the brain processes practicing. That is, do people physically have to sit at an instrument and practice, or can they mentally go over the notes and get the same results?

“Science has proved that you really can get stuff done by mentally practicing,” she said. “Mental practice can change your brain.”

The classes are Gebrian’s contribution to the conference. She hopes they will create some good connections for her, serve as a jumping off point for courses at Rice and encourage more students to get involved in research.

“We hope this will serve as a catalyst for deepening the collaboration between musicians and scientists,” Brandt said. “We see this as the first step to something bigger — something that may help further the research and enable us to gain new insights into ourselves.”

Conference information

The conference and all its events are free and open to the public and will be held in Hirsch Hall at the Shepherd School of Music. Top researchers from the burgeoning field of mind and music will present their work on topics ranging from congenital amusia (tone-deafness) to synesthesia (an intermingling of the senses) to functional brain organization in relation to music.

Mind and music conference
Learn more about the conference that will bring together distinguished scientists, composers and musicians to discuss music’s role in human cognition and behavior
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“This is a very important dialogue to have,” Gebrian said. “Too often scientists studying music and the mind are not musicians themselves, so they don’t understand all the aspects of the music they’re using. And musicians interested in neuroscience have their own set of limitations in understanding some of the scientific connections and technologies neuroscientists are using.”

Exploring the Mind Through Music intends to bridge those gaps and poises Rice to be a trendsetter in encouraging neuroscientists and musicians to interface and share their latest findings and research.

“I expect to see some new collaborations forming as these experts discuss their work and experiences,” Brandt said. “Perhaps musicians will become advisers on research studies or neuroscientists will investigate the importance of early childhood music education, assess the importance of the arts in our mental and social development and consult on such issues as productive and efficient practicing habits.”

Brandt’s own interests focus on how classical music can offer insights into the mind, the limits of language and the elusive connections between thought and feeling. He has studied how music with cyclic structure — a main idea repeating in its entirety either identically or with variations — creates a predictability ideal for social situations. Classical music features musical statements broken into smaller fragments and reassembled in new forms. To process that music, the mind has to be active and diligent, according to Brandt.

“Because of the cyclic nature of pop music, you are constantly at risk of tuning it out,” Brandt said. “Not so with classical music, where your mind is hard at work. Because of its cognitive richness, I believe classical music is potentially a powerful resource for investigating the mind.”

Neuroscientist David Eagleman ’93 will present his research on synesthesia — where stimulation of one sense in the brain triggers an experience in a different sense. For example, the feel of sandpaper might evoke a sensation of forest green or a symphony might be experienced in blues and golds. Eagleman, director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine, will concentrate on musical forms of synesthesia where pitches, chords or instrument timbres trigger the experiences of colors, textures or shapes. He will discuss the cutting-edge technology used in his laboratory to study such things.

Isabelle Peretz, co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research at the University of Montreal, will explore how congenital amusia provides a rare chance to examine the biological basis of music by tracing causal links between genes, environment, brain and behavior.

A talk by David Huron, professor of musicology at Ohio State University, will focus on how music evokes feelings of sadness or grief.

Other speakers will be Jonathan Berger, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts at Stanford University; Fred Lerdahl, the Fritz Reiner Professor of Music Composition at Columbia University; Sarah Rothenberg, renowned pianist and artistic director of Da Camera of Houston; Gottfried Schlaug, director of the Neuroimaging Laboratory of Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School; Ron Tintner, director of the Department of Neurology of The Methodist Hospital; and Harvard’s Tramo.

No registration or reservations are required to attend the conference. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. For the latest conference details, visit http://www.rice.edu/mindandmusic. For additional information, contact Brandt at 713-348-2192 or abrandt@rice.edu.
 
The conference is presented by Robert Yekovich, dean of Shepherd School of Music, thanks to grants from the Deschko Family Lectureship in Music Fund, Rice University’s Humanities Research Center, the Center for Human Performance at The Methodist Hospital and the Faculty Initiatives Fund of Rice University’s Office of the President.