I am an Oxford graduate with a passion for science and for music. In my present postdoctoral work, I pursue the comparative study of our cognitive capacities for music and for language.

The overarching question of my research aims towards a Helmholtzian endeavour that might be so worded: How does meaning, and in particular, emotion, emerge amongst music’s different levels, from the individual notes’ spectra to the syntactic abstractions required for the comprehension of large-scale musical form?    

More broadly, I am very interested in how the sum of our perceptual predispositions and cognitive biases gives rise to culturally-transmitted behaviours (which music and language are prime examples of); and in these behaviours’ underlying neuronal workings.

In testing theories on music’s perception, production, and cultural evolution, I try to employ converging methodologies that cross - if need be - traditional disciplinary boundaries. In particular, I am eager to apply quantitative insights afforded by neuropsychology, neuroimaging, computational modelling, signal processing and data science to hypotheses derived from musicology, music theory, and linguistics.

My work has been published, among others, in Science, Cortex, Neuropsychologia, Scientific Reports, and Behavioural and Brain Sciences; as well as featured in media channels such as the BBC and the ÖRF.