Hi, I’m Sam. I direct The Music Lab, an international research group focusing on the psychology of music. Our work draws on ideas and tools from cognitive and developmental psychology, data science, and evolutionary anthropology, to ask what music is, how music works, and why music exists.

For example, in the Natural History of Song project, we investigate the perceptual and cultural building blocks of music worldwide, to lay out basic facts of our psychological capacities for music. We build music corpora and use them in citizen-science experiments to ask how people hear music and what people understand about music, even when it was produced in cultures or languages unfamiliar to listeners. We’re also interested in how music listening affects emotions and health in the daily lives of infants, children, and parents; and how musical abilities vary across different people and different societies, including rare musical impairments like congenital amusia (tone-deafness).

Since the lab’s inception, over five million people have participated in research via our citizen-science platform. You can be a citizen scientist too at themusiclab.org.

All of our papers and preprints are available below. Here are some highlights from recent and not-so-recent media coverage of our work:

• Bryan Crump and I had a wide-ranging discussion of research on lullabies (papers in Nature Human Behaviour and Science), cross-cultural research on musical understanding (paper in PNAS), auditory perception in non-human species, and the evolution of music, on Radio New Zealand’s Concert.

• Our collaborator Elika Bergelson discussed the effects of tonal language experience on music processing on Public Radio International’s The World (paper in Current Biology). I also chatted with Dale Husband about these findings on Waatea News, Auckland’s Māori radio station.

• I spoke with Colin Peacock about citizen science, gamification, and music for babies on Radio New Zealand’s Saturday Morning.

• Oliver Whang captured the joy and excitement of our big-team cross-cultural research in his New York Times piece on the sounds of infant-directed speech and song (paper in Nature Human Behaviour). We also did some radio: postdoc Courtney Hilton chatted with Michel Martin on NPR’s All Things Considered about the findings, and I spoke with Marco Werman on The World.

• Lab alumnae Connie Bainbridge and Mila Bertolo discussed the relaxing effects of lullabies on infants on The Science of Happiness podcast (paper in Nature Human Behaviour).

• Philip Ball and Ed Yong reported on our cross-cultural studies of music in Prospect Magazine and The Atlantic, respectively (papers in Science and Current Biology).

• Paula Span wrote a lovely New York Times piece about music in infancy, drawing in part on our papers in Psychological Science and Developmental Science. More recently, I discussed those findings on A Life in Music, a BBC Radio 4 special.

• For an accessible summary of research on the idea that “music makes you smarter”, check out this Times op-ed.

A bit about me: I began my career at the Eastman School of Music, where I studied music education and got my first experience working with infants, children, and their families. In my last semester, I took a wonderful course in cognitive development with Elissa Newport and Richard Aslin, which led to a research assistantship at Harvard with Liz Spelke. I stuck around for grad school, working with Liz, Howard Gardner, Max Krasnow, and Steve Pinker. After finishing my doctorate I was lucky enough to start a lab at Harvard with funding from the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

In 2022 my lab moved our collective left foot across the Pacific to New Zealand, at the University of Auckland; and our collective right foot to New Haven, as a part of the Yale Child Study Center. If you’re interested in joining us, please see our open positions.

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Papers & Preprints

Throughout, * denotes advisee and ^ denotes equal contribution. Datasets, materials, & code are all available on request; most are open-access on OSF or GitHub. Please contact me if you need assistance with any of these.

*Bertolo, M., Müllensiefen, D., Peretz, I., Woolley, S. C., ^Sakata, J. T., & ^Mehr, S. A. Sex differences in human music perception are negligible. bioRxiv. In revision.

Albouy, P., Mehr, S. A., Hoyer, R. S., Ginzburg, J., & Zatorre, R. J. (in press). Spectro-temporal acoustical markers differentiate speech from song across cultures. Nature Communications.

Maymon, C. N., Crawford, M. T., Blackburne, K., Botes, A., Carnegie, K., Mehr, S. A., Meier, J., Murphy, J., Miles, N., Robinson, K., Tooley, M., & Grimshaw, G. M. (in press). The presence of fear: how subjective fear, not physiological arousal, shapes the experience of presence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Katiyar, T., Bonnefon, J-F., Mehr, S. A., & Singh, M. (2024). Discovering the unknown unknowns of research cartography with high-throughput natural description. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 47, e50. [Commentary on Almaatouq et al. (2023) “Beyond playing 20 questions with nature: Integrative experiment design in the social and behavioral sciences”] .

*Yurdum, L., Singh, M., Glowacki, L., Vardy, T., Atkinson, Q., *Hilton, C. B., Sauter, D., Krasnow, M. M., & Mehr, S. A. (2023). Universal interpretations of vocal music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(37), e2218593120.

Mehr, S. A. & Bortfeld, H. (2023). Music, a piece of many puzzles in developmental science. Developmental Science. [Introduction to Special Issue “Music In Development”, Guest Editor].

Singh, M. & Mehr, S. A. (2023). Universality, domain-specificity, and development of psychological responses to music. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2, 333-346.

^*Liu, J., ^*Hilton, C. B., Bergelson, E., & Mehr, S. A. (2023). Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of fifty-four languages. Current Biology, 33(10), P1916-1925.E4.

Long, B., *Simson, J., Buxó-Lugo, A., Watson, D. G., & Mehr, S. A. (2023). How games can make behavioural science better. Nature, 613, 433-436.

^*Hilton, C. B., ^*Crowley-de Thierry, L., *Yan, R., Martin, A, & Mehr, S. A. (2022). Children infer the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(3), 839–850

^*Hilton, C. B., ^*Moser, C., *Bertolo, M., *Lee-Rubin, H., Amir, D., *Bainbridge, C. M., *Simson, J., Knox, D., Glowacki, L., Alemu, E., Galbarczyk, A., Jasienska, G., Ross, C. T., Neff, M. B., Martin, A., Cirelli, L. K., Trehub, S. E., Song, J., Kim, M., Schachner, A., Vardy, T. A., Atkinson, Q. D., Salenius, A., Andelin, J., Antfolk, J., Madhivanan, P., Siddaiah, A., Placek, C. D., Salali, G. D., Keestra, S., Singh, M., Collins, S. A., Patton, J. Q., Scaff, C., Stieglitz, J., Ccari Cutipa, S., Moya, C., Sagar, R. R., Anyawire, M., Mabulla, A., Wood, B. M., Krasnow, M. M., & Mehr, S. A. (2022). Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures. Nature Human Behaviour, 6, 1545–1556.

*Atwood, S., ^Schachner, A., & ^Mehr, S. A. (2022). Expectancy effects threaten the inferential validity of synchrony-prosociality research. Open Mind, 6, 280-290.

*Hilton, C. B. & Mehr, S. A. (2022). Citizen science can help to alleviate the generalizability crisis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, e21. [Commentary on Yarkoni (2021) “The generalizability crisis”].

Li, W., Germine, L. T., Mehr, S. A., Srinivasan, M., & Hartshorne, J. K. (2022). Developmental psychologists should adopt citizen science to improve generalization and reproducibility. Infant and Child Development, 33(1), e2348.

Gartstein, M. A., Seamon, D. E., Mattera, J. A., Enlow, M. B., Wright, R. S., Perez-Edgar, K., Buss, K. A., LoBue, V., Bell, M. A., Goodman, S. H., Spieker, S., Bridgett, D. J., Salisbury, A. L., Gunnar, M. R., Mliner, S. B., Muzik, M., Stifter, C. A., Planalp, E. M., Mehr, S. A., Spelke, E. S., Lukowski, A. F., Groh, A. M., Lickenbrock, D. M., Santelli, R., Schudlich, T. D. R., Anzman-Frasca, S., Thrasher, C., Diaz, A., Dayton, C., Moding, K. J., & Jordan, E. M. (2022). Using machine learning to understand age and gender classification based on infant temperament. PLOS ONE, 17(4), e0266026.

*Yan, R., *Jessani, G., Spelke, E. S., de Villiers, P., de Villiers, J., & Mehr, S. A. (2021). Across demographics and recent history, most parents sing to their infants and toddlers daily. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 376, 20210089.

^*Bainbridge, C. M., ^*Bertolo, M., *Youngers, J., *Atwood, S., *Yurdum, L., *Simson, J., *Lopez, K., *Xing, F., Martin, A., & Mehr, S. A. (2021). Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies. Nature Human Behaviour, 5, 2560-264.

*Bertolo, M., Singh, M., & Mehr, S. A. (2021). Sound-induced motion in chimpanzees does not imply shared ancestry for music or dance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(2), e2015664118.

Mehr, S. A., Krasnow, M. M., Bryant, G. A., & Hagen, E. H. (2021). Origins of music in credible signaling [Target article]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, e60. [dual target articles, commentaries, and responses: ]

Mehr, S. A., Krasnow, M. M., Bryant, G. A., & Hagen, E. H. (2021). Toward a productive evolutionary understanding of music [Response to commentaries]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, e122.

^McMahon, E., ^*Kim, D., Mehr, S. A., Nakayama, K., Spelke, E. S., & Vaziri-Pashkam, M. (2021). The ability to predict actions of others from distributed cues is still developing in children. Journal of Vision, 21(5), 14.

^Sheskin, M., ^Scott, K., Mills, C. M., Bergelson, E., Bonawitz, E., Spelke, E. S., Li, F.-F., Keil, F., Gweon, H., Tenenbaum, J. B., Jara-Ettinger, J., Adolph, K. E., Rhodes, M., Frank, M. C., Mehr, S. A., & Schulz, L. (2020). Online developmental science to foster innovation, access, and impact. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(9), 675-678.

*Young, N. R., La Rosa, M., Mehr, S. A., & Krasnow, M. M. (2020). Does greater morning sickness predict carrying a girl? Analysis of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy from retrospective report. Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics, 303, 1161–1166.

Jacoby, N., Margulis, E., Clayton, M., Hannon, E., Honing, H., Iverson, J., Klein, T. R., Mehr, S. A., Pearson, L., Peretz, I., Perlman, M., Polak, R., Ravignani, A., Savage, P. E., Steingo, G., Stevens, C., Trainor, L., Trehub, S., & Veal, M. (2020). Cross-cultural work in music cognition: Challenges, insights, and recommendations. Music Perception, 37(3), 185–195.

Mehr, S. A. (2020). How to write a lab handbook. Biologist, 67(2), 26-28.

Mehr, S. A., Singh, M., Knox, D., Ketter, D. M., Pickens-Jones, D., *Atwood, S., Lucas, C., *Egner, A., Jacoby, N., *Hopkins, E. J., *Howard, R. M., Hartshorne, J. K., Jennings, M. V., *Simson, J., *Bainbridge, C. M., Pinker, S., O’Donnell, T. J., Krasnow, M. M., & Glowacki, L. (2019). Universality and diversity in human song. Science, 366, eaax0868:1-17.

Kotler, J., Mehr, S. A., *Egner, A., Haig, D., & Krasnow, M. M. (2019). Response to music in Angelman syndrome contrasts with Prader-Willi syndrome. Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(5), 420–426.

^Mehr, S. A., ^Singh, M., *York, H. W., Glowacki, L., & Krasnow. M. M. (2018). Form and function in human song. Current Biology, 28(3), 356–368.e5.

Mehr, S. A., *Scannell, D., & Winner, E. (2018). Sight-over-sound judgments of music performance are replicable effects with limited interpretability. PLOS ONE, 13(9), e0202075.

Mehr, S. A., & Spelke, E. S. (2018). Shared musical knowledge in 11-month-old infants. Developmental Science, 21(2), e12542.

Mehr, S. A., Kotler, J., *Howard, R. M., Haig, D., & Krasnow, M. M. (2017). Genomic imprinting is implicated in the psychology of music. Psychological Science, 28(10), 1455–1467.

Mehr, S. A., & Krasnow, M. M. (2017). Parent-offspring conflict and the evolution of infant-directed song. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(5), 674–684.

Mehr, S. A., *Song, L. A., & Spelke, E. S. (2016). For 5-month-old infants, melodies are social. Psychological Science, 27(4), 486–501.

Mehr, S. A. (2015). Miscommunication of science: Music cognition research in the popular press. Frontiers in Psychology, 6(988).

Mehr, S. A. (2014). Music in the home: New evidence for an intergenerational link. Journal of Research in Music Education, 62(1), 78–88.

Mehr, S. A., Schachner, A., Katz, R. C., & Spelke, E. S. (2013). Two randomized trials provide no consistent evidence for nonmusical cognitive benefits of brief preschool music enrichment. PLOS ONE, 8(12), e82007.

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