Month: January 2014

This is a list of researchers that I put together while researching my book about singing. It is by no means complete, it only reflects areas I looked into. Also, the descriptions in parenthesis are notes to myself and they are not necessarily how the person indicated would categorize their work. Some of the people on this list may not be researching singing per se, but I felt their work was related. (And a few of them were added recently.)

I thought this list might be useful to others looking into the science of singing. Suggestions for additions would be most welcome. I think I might update it later to include the papers I found useful and links to the researcher’s labs or websites.

Singing Researchers

Stephen Clift (Singing and Health)
The Sidney De Haan Research Centre for Arts and Health
s.clift@btinternet.com

Mary Cohen (Prison Choirs)
University of Iowa
mary-cohen@uiowa.edu

Proj. Jane Davidson (Group singing paper)
The University of Western Australia
jane.davidson@uwa.edu.au

Robin Dunbar (Performance and pain threshold)
University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.
robin.dunbar@psy.ox.ac.uk

Dr. Thomas Fritz
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
fritz@cbs.mpg.de

Grenville Hancox (Singing and Health)
The Sidney De Haan Research Centre for Arts and Health
grenville.hancox@canterbury.ac.uk

David Huron (Sad music)
Ohio State University
School of Music
huron.1@osu.edu

Petr Janata
University of California
pjanata@ucdavis.edu

Sebastian Jentschke
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
jentschke@cbs.mpg.de 

Julene Johnson, PhD (Singing and Aging)
UCSF School of Nursing
Institute for Health & Aging
julene.johnson@ucsf.edu

Ai Kawakami (sad music)
RIKEN Brain Science Institute
amour.kawakami@gmail.com

Prof. Gunter Kreutz (Singing, S-iga)
University of Oldenburg
gunter.kreutz@gmail.com

Edward Large (Singing, rhythm, mirror neurons)
Florida Atlantic University
Music Dynamics Lab
large@ccs.fau.edu

Daniel Levitin
McGill University
Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise
dlevitin@psych.mcgill.ca

Linda Maguire (Singing and Alzheimers)
George Mason University
maguire.usa@gmail.com

Istvan Molnar-Szakacs (Singing and autism, mirror neurons)
UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior
imolnar@ucla.edu

Kazuo Okanoya (sad music)
RIKEN Brain Science Institute
Okanoya@brain.riken.jp

Katie Overy
University of Edinburgh
k.overy@ed.ac.uk

Lawrence Parsons
The University of Sheffield
L.Parsons@sheffield.ac.uk 

Aniruddh Patel
The Neurosciences Institute/Tufts
a.patel@tufts.edu

Julie Ann Pooley
Edith Cown University
j.pooley@ecu.edu.au   

Valorie N. Salimpoor (effects of listening to music)
Rotman Research Institute
valorie.salimpoor@mail.mcgill.ca

Ahmet Muhip Sanal
Abant Izzet Baysal University
muhipsanal@yahoo.com

Gottfried Schlaug (singing and stroke)
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School
The Music And Neuroimaging Lab
gschlaug@bidmc.harvard.edu

Dr. Jeanette Tamplin (Singing and brain injury)
University of Melbourne
jeanette.tamplin@unimelb.edu.au

Michael Thaut
Colorado State University
Michael.Thaut@colostate.edu

Laurel Trainor (infant response to singing)
McMaster University
Auditory Development Lab

Robert Zatorre (music and the brain)
Montreal Neurological Institute 
robert.zatorre@mcgill.ca 

There’s this app, Rafflecopter, that I can use to set up a raffle for my books. I suppose I could do a raffle without it, but still. The thing would be thinking of a way to conduct it that wouldn’t be annoying for people to enter. Or be too much work.

For Christmas I got two prisms for my window, and I love them. The colors move around my apartment throughout the day, sometimes lighting up my hands, or the cats, and other things. This is a gargoyle thing on the wall in my kitchen

Every year I attend the Grace Church performance of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. I grew up listening to this opera at Christmas, to hear it now makes me feel … like life goes on forever. I remember snippets of the holiday from my childhood, my grandparents, our house in Huntington, tinsel (never used now due to cats). Sigh.

Here’s a very short video I made of their performance 7 years ago, in 2014!! I really am a creature of habit. Another nice thing, attendees get a poinsettia out of it! The church invites the audience up onto the altar afterwards to help themselves to a plant. The green one (once red) was from last year, the red one was this year’s.

A brief video of caroling at Jenny and Christy Spiecher’s house. Jenny used to live in the first floor of my building. I have a picture from their party last year (scroll down). Two of the musicians are the same, and they are from the Romp family, from Christmas on Jane Street: A True Story. They’ve been selling trees on Jane Street since 1988. This party was packed, by the way, but most of the people were in the room behind me. Where the food was.

The maddening thing is, when I went out I realized later that I’d gotten some things for Christmas that would have helped. Like the “infinity” scarf, which would have protected with my freezing-to-death face. And ear muffs. Speaking of which, check out the Tweetie Pie ear muffs.

Well, as cold as I was, at least I wasn’t these poor guys. (Checking off bus driver as a possible mid-life career change.)