David Dunn is a composer who prefers to lecture and engage in site-specific interactions or research-oriented activities. Over the past 40 years, his work has explored the liminal spaces between music and language, mind and environment, and art and science. In recent years he has largely abandoned the pursuit of musical composition as an expressive force to investigate the potential of sound to directly alter biological systems and to design listening strategies and technologies for...

Acoustic biologist, founder of the Elephant Listening Project, and whale song expert Katy Payne received a BA from Cornell in music and biology in 1959. Since then her professional work and contributions have all stemmed from original discoveries at the intersection of these fields. Humpback whales sing long songs that change extensively, progressively, and rapidly with time—an example of non-human cultural evolution with endlessly fascinating details. Katy's discovery of song-changing led to...

Douglas Irving Repetto is an artist and teacher. His work, including sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software is presented internationally. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity; ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show; organism: making art with living systems; and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Douglas teaches at Columbia University where he is the director of the Sound Arts MFA...

Aniruddh Patel joined Tufts University in the fall of 2012 as an associate professor of psychology. Previously he was a senior fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. As a cognitive neuroscientist, he conducts research that focuses on the relationship between music and language, using this interface to explore the mental foundations of both of these distinctively human abilities. He has used a range of methods in his research, including human brain imaging, theoretical analyses,...

Thalia Wheatley, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth. Dr. Wheatley completed her doctoral training in social psychology with Timothy Wilson and Daniel Wegner at the University of Virginia. After graduating, she received neuroimaging training as a postdoctoral NIH research fellow with Alex Martin, Ph.D. in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition directed by Leslie Ungerleider. Her research focus is human social intelligence and how that intelligence...

Christian Wolff is widely acknowledged as one of the most important American composers of the 20th century. He was born in 1934 in Nice, France, and has lived in the U.S. since 1941. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and, briefly, composition with John Cage. His association and friendship with Cage and with Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor helped set the direction of his work, as did later association with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew. Since 1952 he has been musically...

Is music an evolutionary adaptation? This lecture doesn't answer that question. Instead we consider some of the tools available for addressing the issue. One of the foremost tools is "following the money" of pleasure: Adaptive behaviors are encouraged through a combination pleasure and pain. By examining the specific pleasures evoked by music, we can better infer what adaptive functions might be served through music-making. David Huron is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor at the...

Rex Cocroft started his academic career as a piano major, and after graduation decided to pursue a longstanding interest in the biology of amphibians and reptiles. He leveraged a childhood love of turtles into a research assistant position in the Smithsonian herpetology department, where he went on field trips to the forests of Peru and Venezuela. Those trips were meant to document the diversity of Amazonian frogs; and because differences in mating songs often reveal hidden diversity in...