Hi, I’m Sam. I direct The Music Lab, an international research group working on auditory perception; the psychology of music, speech, and sound; and gamified citizen science. Our work draws on ideas and tools from cognitive and developmental psychology, data science, and evolutionary anthropology, to ask: Why do we hear what we hear?

For example, we run experiments with infants, children, and adults to figure out how human minds process music, speech, and other sounds from everyday life. We study how singing and music-listening affect emotions and health in the lives of infants and their parents. We build and analyze global collections of music, and play these collections to listeners in citizen-science experiments, to examine the universal building blocks of music. We’re also interested in how musical abilities vary across different people and different societies, including rare musical impairments like congenital amusia (tone-deafness).

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

Our research has been funded by the US National Institutes of Health, the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi, the US National Science Foundation, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and the Music Man Foundation.

We are proponents of open science and make all aspects of our research publicly available. Our data, materials, and code — including audio files and metadata from our cross-cultural corpora — are posted on GitHub and Zenodo. All of our papers and preprints are available below.

Here are some highlights from recent and not-so-recent media coverage of our work:

• The Royal Society Te Apārangi put together this video featuring our lab-based work with infants and gamified citizen science on the internet, as part of the 2023 Prime Minister’s Science Prizes.

• Radio New Zealand’s Claire Concannon profiled our lab for Our Changing World, featuring grad students Juliet Barry and Marty Snarskis.

• 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).

• 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. I also 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 we 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.

Mehr, S. A. Principles of music perception. PsyArXiv. In revision.

^*Cho, E., ^*Yurdum, L., *Ebinne, E., *Hilton, C. B., *Lai, E., *Bertolo, M., *Brown, P., *Milosh, B., Sened, H., Tamir, D. I., & Mehr, S. A. Ecological momentary assessment reveals causal effects of music enrichment on infant mood. PsyArXiv. In revision.

*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.

*Yurdum, L., Mehr, S. A., Kamiloğlu, R., & Sauter, D. Emotional responses to music are shaped by acoustic features, individual differences, and contextual factors. PsyArXiv. In review.

*Barry, J. C., Hagen, E., & Mehr, S. A. (in press). Vocalizations are ideal identity signals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. [Commentary on Moffett’s “What is a society?”].

Albouy, P., Mehr, S. A., Hoyer, R. S., Ginzburg, J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2024). Spectro-temporal acoustical markers differentiate speech from song across cultures. Nature Communications, 5, 4835.

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. (2024). The presence of fear: how subjective fear, not physiological arousal, shapes the experience of presence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(6), 1500-1516.

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.’s “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, 256-264.

*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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