Music and Meaning

Music and Meaning - Panel Discussion
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Videos from the event

  1. SPEAKER: David Huron, Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor, School of Music & Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Ohio State University
  2. SPEAKER: Aniruddh D. Patel, Professor of Psychology, Tufts University
  3. SPEAKER: Elizabeth Tolbert, Professor of Musicology, Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University
  4. PANEL DISCUSSION: Panel Discussion

Event information

October 19, 2017, Italian Academy, Columbia University

The extraordinary power of music to communicate complex emotions and thoughts has fascinated scholars for centuries. Music taps into cognitive mechanisms that govern our daily interactions with the world, such as expectations and violations of these expectations, and appears to have much in common with language. In addition, music plays social and ethical functions that can be understood from philosophical, historical, and cultural perspectives.

Three renowned scholars from the humanities and cognitive science show how these modes of inquiry bear on each other – and explain what makes music mean.

Moderated by Andrew Goldman, Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia University; and Jacqueline Gottlieb, Professor of Neuroscience, Columbia University.