Exploring the mind through music

Music offers one of the substantive ways to the study the mind.

That was one of the biggest takeaways of the “Exploring the Mind Through Music” conference hosted by Rice’s Shepherd School of Music June 6-10. The conference featured a series of lectures and short presentations to promote collaboration between musicians and scientists and to increase public interest in this fast-growing discipline. Faculty and fellows from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America participated.

Anthony Brandt, an associate professor of composition and theory at Rice, directed the event with Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist Xaq Pitkow.

“Every healthy human is born with the ability to appreciate music, and it engages memory, attention, emotion, physical motion, sense of self and more,” Brandt said. “In addition, musical disorders such as amusia are often very revealing about similar types of cognitive disorders that are harder to probe.”

(Photos provided by Anthony Brandt)