Both professors at Indiana University (IU), neuroscientist Anna Kalinovsky works in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences (PBS) and her husband, Grigory Kalinovsky, is a violin professor at the Jacobs School of Music. 

Together, they have created an interdisciplinary course, “The Neural Basis of Music Perception,” that combines Anna’s research in neurodevelopmental biology with Grigory’s experience in violin pedagogy. 

Now over a decade in the making, the course explores the neural bases of musical experiences and what they reveal about human cognition. 

Grigory’s contribution to the course includes how phrasing, dynamics, and rhythm serve as tools to communicate emotion, and Anna’s work reveals that music training could be a roadmap for understanding cognition.

“The internal feeling of rhythm and timing is essential for smooth, repetitive movements and also for higher-order cognitive processes like taking turns while speaking,” she explained. 

Encouraged to lead discussions on current research on the neuroscience of music, students will engage with topics such as why lullabies calm infants, how rhythm “entrains” the premotor cortex, how a song sounds undeniably “Christmassy,” or what makes some songs particularly catchy. 

Additionally, they will encounter research that merges musicology with neuroscience, and will draw from their own firsthand experiences as music consumers and performers.

The course will also help students recognize cognitive biases and their own “professional blind spots.” Ultimately, the course invites science and art to coexist as well as inform and enrich one another.

“Musicians, like all artists, think deliberately about elements that evoke specific cognitive and emotional associations in listeners, as do scientists, who seek to understand how sensory inputs from our environment are interpreted as specific percepts,” Grigory suggested. “It is always fascinating to discuss [the students’] ideas on what constitutes music, what they find enjoyable about listening to or playing music, and why we listen to music.”