Last week Dr Ruth Herbert, Senior Lecturer in Music Psychology and Performance, was invited to give a guest lecture at the prestigious Music and Cognition Lab at Princeton University.
The talk centred on the psychological characteristics of musical and multimodal engagement in everyday life and participatory arts contexts.
Following the talk, Ruth said: ‘The work of the Princeton Music Cognition Lab, led by Professor Elizabeth Margulis, is truly interdisciplinary, meshing psychology and neuroscience with humanistic insight. Recent work focuses on the nature of musical imagining – including visual images that might arise when we listen to music, but also the relationship of music to other senses.
‘It was a pleasure to share my work on absorption and musical daydreaming and to hear about new projects emerging from the lab’.
Ruth has published extensively in the field of consciousness studies (including trance, ASC, flow, absorption and dissociation) and the arts. Most recently, she contributed a chapter on musical daydreaming to an edited volume on music and mental imagery (Routledge, 2022).