Hello!

I am a cross-disciplinary researcher primarily interested in the cognitive and cultural foundations of music.

I investigate how individual mental representations of tonal structure scale up to emerging population-level patterns to produce distinct musical "blueprints" observed across cultures. More broadly, I am interested in evolutionary processes operating on culture, asking how systems of communication—especially music and language—diversify across populations.

My research combines experiments, computational modelling and simulation, and corpus analysis in the digital humanities, drawing on behavioural, acoustic, and neuroimaging datasets. I work with reproducible, code-driven workflows and large-scale datasets at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, data science, computational musicology, and corpus linguistics.

By integrating these approaches, my goal is to understand how neurocognitive mechanisms and social learning jointly shape the cultural evolution of music and language.

My work has been published in journals such as Science, Cortex, Neuropsychologia, and Behavioural and Brain Sciences; and featured in media outlets such as the BBC and the ÖRF. 

Upcoming activities

• Summer 2026: research visit at the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE, within NCCR Evolving Language), University of Zurich, where I will explore how musical aesthetic ideals constrain language change over time.

• 24 April 2026: My group will participate in the Lange Nacht der Forschung (#LNF26) taking place in Vienna (stand: "Musical minds").

• 8 April 2026: I will be presenting at EVOLANG XVI (the International Conference on the Evolution of Language), in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

Recent highlights

• March 2026: chapter on biologically-based universals in music, co-written with Felix Haiduk, accepted in "The Biology of Music" (Oxford University Press, eds.: Ravignani; Schiavio, Vuoskoski, Parncutt).

• December 2025: chapter on the evolution of human synchronisation abilities, co-written with Tecumseh Fitch, accepted in "Nature Beats: the What, Why and How of Animal Rhythmic Behaviours" (Springer, eds.: Sauciuc, Lameira, Persson).