Sangeeta Ullal - sangeeta.ullal @ gmail.com

Sangeeta Ullal is interested in perception and cognition of music from a cross-cultural perspective. Having received training in Hindustani vocal and instrumental music, she gained an understanding of the subtleties of Indian Classical Music. She first developed an appreciation for cross-cultural aspects of music when she briefly played with a fusion Jazz band, incorporating Indian Classical and Western Jazz styles of music. While getting an undergraduate degree in Biology and Psychology from McMaster University, Canada, she realized that there was a vast area of overlap between her interests in psychology and music. She is interested in rhythm and tempo perception, specifically how musicians and non-musicians process extremely slow or extremely fast tempos, such as Vilambit and Dhrut in Hindustani Music. She hopes to approach this from a developmental perspective, examining how and when these abilities develop over time from infancy through adulthood.

Parker Tichko - UNLVmusiclab @ gmail.com

Parker Tichko is an active composer, producer, musician and remix artist. He holds a B.A. in both Music and Psychology from Wheaton College (MA). His research interests are aimed at the perception of emotion in music, parallels between speech and music, and the development of musical abilities. He writes for Hybrid Online Magazine and blogs obsessively about music cognition, music theory, and popular/classical music on his personal blog. He is currently composing a book of piano preludes and a string quartet themed around the four seasons. 

Matt Rosenthal - rosent17 @ unlv.nevada.edu

Matt Rosenthal is curious about the philosophy of mind-- particularly the mind-body problem-- and also has a life-long interest in music which directed him towards research in the Auditory Cognition Lab. He hopes to tackle questions about the mind-body problem by investigating how listeners perceive temporal patterns. Matt’s research currently focuses on perceptual interactions between metrical and pitch structure in music.

More lab pictures, Individual RAs

Erin Hannon - erin.hannon @ unlv.edu

Erin Hannon received a Ph.D. Experimental Psychology in 2005 from Cornell University, subsequently worked as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and joined the UNLV department of Psychology in 2007.  Her research combines her interests in cognitive and perceptual psychology, culture, infant and child development, music, and language. Her research examines how an individual’s culture influences his or her perception (of rhythm and timing) in music and language, the similarities and differences between musical and linguistic skills as they develop during childhood, and the various ways that music training and experience does or does not influence social, cognitive, and linguistic abilities and behaviors. Download publications or her vita.

Clockwise from top: Caleb Picker, Sangeeta Ullal, Matt Rosenthal, Stephen Boutin, Erin Hannon, Rachel Engh, Aaronell Matta, Sarah Jones, and Katie Weghorst (Spring 2010). Other valued lab members not shown: Rikka Quam, Elora Ramos, Jennifer Underhill, Alexandra Olsen and Joseph Griego.

Hui (Charles) Li - ucbchazli @ gmail.com

I’m working with Drs. Joel Snyder and Erin Hannon. I received a BA with honors in Psychology and a minor in Music from UC Berkeley. Afterward, I moved across the country and worked as a research assistant at the Music and Neuroimaging Lab at Beth Isreal Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, having worked with various functional and structural neuroimaging techniques and behavioral experiments on projects involving music and emotion, absolute pitch, and tone-deafness. My general research interests are in music and the brain.

Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden -                     vandenbo @ unlv.nevada.edu

Christina is studying under Drs. Erin Hannon and Joel Snyder. Her interests in music and the brain began early in her academic career when she began to study the neural underpinnings of music and emotions for a high school senior project. Since then, she’s performed studies about musicians’ and non-musicians’ perception of affect in melodies, and she plans to do EEG and ERP studies about infants’ auditory perception and differentiation of music and language. Christina graduated in 2008 from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI and worked for 2 years at her alma mater’s Center for Social Research, honing her research and analysis skills. Christina has also been playing the cello and singing in choirs for the past 18 years.