The Sydney Music, Mind, and Body Lab, led by Dr Steffen Herff, operates at the intersection between the arts and science. It is a state-of-the-art STEM lab located at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Our mission is to understand and unlock music's potential and support musicians in achieving successful, and sustainable careers.
We use behavioural, computational, and physiological techniques (e.g., EMG, EEG, ECoG, and thermal imaging) to explore how music shapes higher order cognition, such as memory, emotions, and imagination.
Concurrently, the lab reciprocates to the music community, by supporting musicians' mental and physical well-being through custom-built, evidence-based solutions to threats such as music performance anxiety, and musculoskeletal injuries.
The lab tackles complex, and diverse interdisciplinary research questions, such as how music is represented in the brain, how music can systematically shape listeners' imagination, how to mitigate music performance anxiety, and develops means to optimise performance whilst avoiding injury.
We work closely with the music community to understand the unique environment and threats to musicians’ mental and physical health. With a rigorous scientific approach, we then work to understand these factors in great detail and build custom, evidence-based solution such as instrument specific Biofeedback to help musicians overcome those challenges.
Imagination is a core part of human cognition, yet despite its importance in everyday function, we know very little about it. In our work, we show that music can be used to systematically shape imagination, and we apply what we find to improve wellbeing, and performance in environments such as music, sports, and clinical therapy.
In our work, we demonstrated that music is remarkably resilient to forgetting. We further explore this phenomenon to understand its underlying mechanisms. For example, we showed that structural familiarity and enculturation are critical to maintain this effect. We also explore ways in which to leverage music’s remarkable properties in contexts such as learning.
Music theory provides deep insights into the structure of music. Yet, despite centuries of important insights, many music theoretical principles have never been empirically investigated. We collaborate with musicologists to provide an evidence basis for our understanding of music and advance it by critically testing and shaping its underlying components.
URL
embed-cfd0d65725
Thermal Imaging can help us understand how the body self-regulates under the high demands of music making
