Oct 8, 2020
Hosts Enbani and Mark interview Olivia Podolak Lewandowska,
PhD, Assistant Professor with the Department of Psychology at the
University of Toronto Scarborough, delving into the
interdisciplinary field of music cognition, which combines music,
psychology, neuroscience, music theory, musicology, music therapy,
computer science and linguistics.
Olivia discusses her life-long passion for music as a pianist,
how it led her to study the science of music more intensely, and
her research, which investigates how the structural elements of
music can guide performance and listening. She also compares
musical processing between musicians versus non-musicians, both at
the behavioural level and the neural level using EEG. Olivia
lets Mark and Enbani pick her brain on topics such as the
relationship between music and performance, how popular music has
changed over time, what the research says about what sounds good to
our ears and the role of music in a society.
You'll learn about atonal music (check out Olivia's YPS Atonal
Bangers playlist here), how people with perfect
pitch process music differently, and get her recommendations about
the best soundtrack to listen to when you're writing a thesis
(Interstellar by Hans
Zimmer).
Olivia received her B.Sc. in Psychology, Neuroscience and
Behaviour, with a specialization in Music Cognition at McMaster
University in 2012. She recently completed her doctorate at
the University of Toronto Scarborough in 2019, where she works as
an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream), primarily teaching
statistics, but also music cognition when the opportunity
arises.