Instru(mental)
Want to scientifically improve your life with music? Every episode of Instru(mental) explores music psychology research and how it shapes your brain, your body, and how you feel. Thoughtful, practical suggestions for integrating music into your life. Hosted by board-certified music therapist, Brea Murakami.
Instru(mental)
#21 - An MT-BC Goes to SMPC (2026)
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Where can you catch up on the latest music cognition research, watch a musical about the scientific process, and karaoke to your heart's desire? SMPC 2026! This episode is series of recordings from the 2026 Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) conference from a music therapist's perspective. And no, we were not sponsored by Hoosier Mama Pie.
Featured Interviewees and Resources
- Emily Wood, PhD candidate at Mcmaster University (Insta: @emilywood2, @live.lab)
- Peter Martens, PeARL Lab at Texas Tech (Geolisten app)
- Science! The Musical composed by Dr. Andrew Goldman, featuring Yifan Huang, PhD student
- Dr. Kelsie Lopez, MIND Lab at Northeastern University (Insta: @mindlabneu)
Introduction to SMPC
SPEAKER_05Last week I found myself in Evanston, Illinois, for the first time in about 10 years. I lived there for a few years after I completed my music therapy internship at Evanston Hospital, and I got to go back to my favorite foodie haunts like Blind Faith Cafe and Who's Your Mama Pie. But the reason I was in Evanston in the first place was for the Society for Music Perception and Cognition's 2026 conference, which was being hosted at Northwestern University right at the edge of Lake Michigan. The Society for Music Perception and Cognition, or SMPC, is a North American scholarly organization dedicated to the study of music psychology. I started going to SMPC conferences in 2015, and I think I've been to every SMPC conference since then. It helps that they're held every other year and are usually located in the United States or Canada, but it's become a bit of a tradition for me and my music therapy slash music cognition nerd friends, Daniel and Jess, to meet up at SMPC. By the numbers, this year's SMPC conference had about 340 attendees, 100 talks, and 130 research posters, with the top topics centered on music and neuroscience, music and language, music emotions, rhythm perception, and individual differences in music. But there were so many other topics, and some talks specifically talked about how music interventions are being used in community settings with older adults, with autistic children for developmental delays, for executive function. And this is just a taste of what was on the scheduled program. This episode is going to be a compilation of recordings I took at SMPC, narrating what was going on, interviewing some of the researchers who spoke at the conference, and debriefing with my music therapist friends at the end. My apologies ahead of time for any inconsistencies in the recording quality, but I hope you get a taste of how great this music cognition community is and why I keep coming back. We did not get to have coffee yet. Daniel, what are you excited about for SMPC?
SPEAKER_06I'm excited to get re-inspired as a music therapist because it's been a minute and mommy's tired.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, we don't know as many faces as we know at music therapy conferences, but we're gonna get to know some people over the weekend.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, we always make friends. And it'll be nice to see some of our buddies from the various SNPCs and workshops we've done over the years.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, everyone that was like a student now is like junior faculty level, so we're not the young new ones anymore.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I know our friends who are doing PhDs when we did that workshop with David Huron back in the day. Um yeah, they're there are like PhD students and now they're professors across the country. And we used to think like, wow, someday we'll be professors, and now there's like, oh, it's it's really intense and hard. Also, it's an absolutely gorgeous building, just uh there's a big wall that's like diagonal. There's a gorgeous view of the Michigan Lake. Lake Michigan, the Michigan Lake.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it feels like we're on a cruise ship from where we're standing right now.
SPEAKER_06It does, it does look like a cruise ship.
SPEAKER_05Alright, let's go into the first event.
Emily Wood, Synchrony, and Social Bonding
SPEAKER_05Please give me your name, your affiliation, and what kind of work you do generally.
SPEAKER_01So I'm Emily Wood, I'm a PhD candidate at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. I research nonverbal behaviors and I use motion capture. So I do this in expert musicians as well as in folks who listen to music together and look at things like movement synchrony and how that relates to social bonding.
SPEAKER_05Great. Can you describe the research that you presented at this conference this week?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, definitely. So this week I presented on a study we ran at the live lab at McMaster University in Hamilton. So at the live lab we have a motion capture system, which allows us to do this research. I'm really interested in movement synchrony, and the science shows us that when we move in sync together, we actually tend to like each other more and feel more bonded with each other. So I was really interested in this, and I got thinking, and you know, I go out to karaoke a lot, and I like to go out with friends, and sometimes a song comes on and we all like vibe to that song together, and that really got me thinking, wow, if we all like really like the song, we all start to move in sync to it together. I wonder if that could bring about these effects of social bonding. Uh, so that's what uh I presented about. I we ran a study on music preference and how that relates to movement synchrony. So we had uh groups of participants come into the lab who either liked or did not like uh some music, and we motion captured them while they listened to this music. We actually used a k-pop in our study, so we brought in people who either liked or disliked k-pop, um, as well as normal pop as well. We had some different groups. Uh we motion captured them, and we did find that people who liked the music, who are fans of that music, all spontaneously moved in sync, did that music together, and it all translated to feelings of closeness and liking each other. So the more they moved in sync, the more they liked each other after. But that was driven by their music preference uh to begin with.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so in the moment, interpersonal synchrony might be able to temporarily or in the short term kind of override or help make more connections, even if you might not have longer-term musical preference similarities with a stranger.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you don't need to know their music preference explicitly. It could just happen by sharing this experience together, basically. And yes, it was completely in the moment. These were strangers we brought into the lab. They didn't know each other, they listened to music together forever. It was seven and a half minutes in our study, and that was enough time for them to feel like they liked each other more. And so this is just the fan groups. The fan groups liked each other more than the non-fan groups did.
SPEAKER_05Great. And are there any common misunderstandings or like everyday takeaways that you'd recommend for the listeners?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think the main takeaway is that music preference matters. And I know a bunch of your listeners are music therapists, and I think they already know this. Uh, when you use music that the participant prefers, it has all these therapeutic outcomes that are way better than if you use just like random or neutral. Music is so subjective, like the music that one person loves might be completely like neutral to another person, and all these amazing benefits we get from music, it's really tied to those subjective music preferences. So we always have to be taking in that into account and whatever outcomes uh you're looking at. So like especially important in therapeutic settings and in educational settings. And our research is now showing that it's also important for social settings, just in general. Anywhere where you're interested in social connection, you should be taking into account people's preferences for music.
SPEAKER_05Great. Thanks for that's always a great reminder. Uh is there any like social media things that you'd like to share, like Eddie where people can learn more about your work that you'd like to let us know about?
SPEAKER_01Sure. There's Live Lab at McMaster University. They have a website, they also have an Instagram page, live.lab on Instagram, and my personal Instagram is Emily Wood2. I post about research on there as well.
SPEAKER_04Great, thank you so much.
Day 2 Check-In
SPEAKER_05Alright, this is lunchtime of day two. We're in the campus of Northwestern, just went to the library, which was beautiful and looked like Hogwarts inside. Here's some cicadas. Alright, so we've gone through day two morning of sessions, and our good friend Jess McClain talked about her dissertation research about speech and noise and rhythmic cueing. Daniel, how was day one for you of the conference?
SPEAKER_06Um, it was nice, a lot of smart people.
SPEAKER_05It's nice, you know, we've been going to these conferences since 2017, and we have a bunch of friends, and it's nice to see people and one of the biggest differences for me between these music science conferences and music therapy conferences is the poster session is the place to be.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I would agree. The conference design just on a macro level of SMPCs are always so good. They do a really good job with the sessions of having the formats, basically, they'll have three or four groupings at the same time for concurrent sessions. But vastly those sessions will be like 20 minutes, 20 minutes, 20 minutes of different things under that umbrella. Sometimes there's an outlier that's like we didn't know where to fit you. Not only that, but then it's totally socially fine to just get up and go after one is done because they're all on the same 20-minute um like setup of like three and three in an hour. And so, whereas at music therapy conferences, the concurrent sessions are usually the whole hour and 15 minutes or however long it is, and to get up and go feels always feels a little uncomfortable because it makes it feels like personal and kind of mean. But with these, it's like totally fine. And then I really appreciated yesterday they did a session about access to music cognition research, and it was it was from the DEI committee, it was a panel, and and I appreciated that they booked that when nothing else was going on, which is just a really nice piece from a DEI lens to like actually make it accessible for people to go in the first place, is that it's not competing with anything.
SPEAKER_05Alright, it is day one of the poster session. I don't know if you could even hear me right now, but I'm in like the last 20 minutes. I got here a little late, and it is still like there are people at every single poster. Okay, so let's see if we can walk around and see what the topics are. I see things on melodic expectation, tambral memory. Oh, here we go. AI-generated music, tone scrambles, perceptual geometry in the triadic progression space.
Dr. Peter Martens and the Geolisten app
SPEAKER_05Can you tell me your name, affiliation, and what you're researching these days?
SPEAKER_07Uh sure. This is Peter Martins. I'm at Texas Tech University. Um I'm uh music uh professor, but also chair of a Department of Interdisciplinary Arts, and that leads me into a lot of diverse areas, one of which is uh what we might call cross-cultural music studies, and we we ran a uh a study a couple years ago in um what what we call the Performing Arts Research Lab. The acronym is PERL. It's very euphonious, right? One of the I the questions was you know, we hear sounds throughout our lives that are meant to evoke other cultures as Americans, right? So in movies, in music, whatever. And so we designed a series of studies that gave people, in some cases, just limited timbers, a single instrument, or a full musical context, and um were asking them, where do you think this is from in the world? Uh and and then we we had controlled the the tambers and such that were in the music that to see if we could make some predictions based on on what people said. And what we found in the lab was people were coming out of the lab saying, Oh, is it done already? Or can I keep you know, can I do it again, or can I have the playlist from that study? And if anyone who does uh research with you know participants in labs, most people are like, give me my 10 bucks and let me go home, right? They they don't want they don't really enjoy themselves. And so we got this idea with the interface we had that like, gosh, this this could really be a game. This could be something uh commercializable, which is is uh certainly a thing at all, especially research universities. So we uh we applied to a we have an incubator at Texas Tech called the Innovation Hub, and and we were uh accepted into this program and they gave us a bunch of money to turn this into a commercial app, which is called GeoListen, G E O Listen. Um, and it's uh it's basically a gamified version of this research study that I think is fun. It's like a one-play-a-day model like Wordle, but there's an archive you can go back, you know, the many months and and play stuff. And it also will will give us um very depersonalized but but research data on people's listening people listening around the world and how how good they are at the game, essentially. That's that's one of the metrics. Are people in the US better at at this? Or if today's puzzle is like Zimbabwe, like is there a clear, like, oh, people in Africa actually recognize this song much more readily than people in Europe, let's say, right? That sort of thing. So it's it's kind of a name that tune, but it's like, where in the world is this tune from?
SPEAKER_05Very cool. And I'm curious what kind of research questions are you posing that you're hoping to answer with this, like hopefully really large data set?
SPEAKER_07Yeah, that's that's a good question. Um that is actually still under development. We're kind of getting the the mechanism up and running, and um and my colleague David Sears is co-founder of of the business and really the originator of the of the the original research idea. A lot of it has to do with timbre. So, what are the isolatable timbers? Um, one of the features of the game is that the first time you hear the song, the vocals have been stripped out. So all the songs have vocals, but you don't get any language cues, you don't get any vocal cues. So can you get it on the first try? It's very hard. I'll I'll you know, spoiler, whatever. Fair warning. Um it it's a really fun game. And you'll get it in the end. I mean, we have a hint structure, so you get five guesses just like Wordle, but the first um instrumental only version is really tricky, and then you get the the linguistic information. So one of the main questions is how much easier is it for people to recognize the region or the country of a song with the vocal component of someone from that country versus just instruments.
SPEAKER_05Okay, great. Where can people download the app? It's open to anyone around the world that wants to download it and play the game and contribute data. Where can they find it?
SPEAKER_07Yeah, it's a free download. It's a free app. Uh the daily play is free. It's on the the Google Play Store and the Apple uh store. Um and uh the archive where you go back and play, uh you can play, you know, many, many dozens of puzzles from past months. Um we have to we have to keep the lights on, so to speak. So there's there's some ad structure built into the archive, but the daily play is always free. So yeah, it's uh fun. And you will learn geography. You know, you you might not actually know where Zimbabwe is, but you you will know it once you play a puzzle that Zimbabwe is the answer for. You will not forget where that is on the map.
SPEAKER_05I love that kind of an extra geographical trivia building for your knowledge. Lovely. Um, is there anywhere else like a website or any social media channels where people can like be on the lookout for the research findings once they come out?
SPEAKER_07Um, we haven't had that, we haven't had that planned yet. That's probably a year down the road, but I will say basic webpage is geolisten.com, but we also have a group play version that you uh maybe saw earlier today. It's called Geolisten Party, and that is the website is geolisten.com/slash party, and you can actually purchase a set of eight songs for use in a group where you, as the game master, several games that are available have this dynamic, you know, let's say you're having a party, you've got a dozen friends over, whatever. Um, it gives you eight songs where um everybody individually can try to figure out where they are from in the world, and there's a live leaderboard that you know updates on the screen. So it's a fun dynamic. We had the whole pub doing it earlier today, and it was uh it gives people an opportunity to show their skills they maybe don't even know they have.
SPEAKER_05Alright, new game night idea. There you go. Awesome. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, good to talk to you, Brian.
Science! The Musical
SPEAKER_05All right, it's the end of day two. We just had a delicious dinner at Who's Your Mama Pie? And now we are doing something that I've never done at a conference before. We are going to an original music performance. My friend Jess here has seen it twice already somehow. Good reviews. Jess, can you give us a little preview, please?
SPEAKER_03All right. So this is Science, the musical with that prosody. And this is written, directed, produced by Andrew Goldman, um, who is on faculty at Indiana University and also happens to be on my dissertation committee. Um, he has done this uh musical at IU, so I have seen it before, and I've also seen the online recording. And I am really excited for you guys to watch it and get your reactions because essentially it's about a girl who submits her research to a conference and hasn't written the paper yet. Um and it's basically about like the trials and tribulations of her learning about science because it's her first year of her PhD, um, but in a musical format. And so there's it's a lot of tongue-in-cheek, like statistical jokes and jokes about coffee and things.
SPEAKER_05And the cast tonight is pulled from other conference attendees.
SPEAKER_03Yes, so I heard that there is a special guest. I don't know what that means, but I know that there are a couple professors in in the band.
SPEAKER_05It is a full house in here. There's like 200 seats. It's like pretty much full. Like there's an open seat here or there, but I think we're about to begin, and I'm super excited.
SPEAKER_06Welcome to the science of the musical. It is a joy to share the show with you all this evening.
SPEAKER_05This is a very excellent piece for this. Luckily, it's a little bit of a later start this morning. The first sessions don't start until 10 45 a.m. And I'm really excited the first session is an interdisciplinary panel. So we'll see kind of what connections and bridges are being made between music cognition researchers and other areas of practice.
Dr. Kelsie Lopez and Music Reward Sensitivity
SPEAKER_05Could you please give me your name, your affiliation, and what kind of work you do?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm Dr. Kelsey Lopez. I am a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University. I actually just defended a month ago, so still pretty fresh. Overall, I study how early life experiences and musical engagement may lead to differences in resilience into adulthood. That's my kind of broad, overarching question that I'm interested in. But today at the conference, I was more interested in talking about my work on individual differences in music reward sensitivity. So how we derive pleasure from music and how that may influence um specific activation in these more reward-related regions of the brain during a stressor paradigm. So if you are more sensitive to the rewarding features of music and find music to be more rewarding, how you may benefit from using music when you're in an acute stressor situation.
SPEAKER_05And really briefly, can you give us the takeaways? So if we're feeling really stressed out, are there certain types of music that your research would suggest we should try out first before other types of music?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the work I presented on today focused on music from different developmental windows, so from preschool childhood and adolescence. And what I found, particularly for individuals who score higher on this scale that says that they use music for social reward, I find that in, you know, listening to music after being stressed out, they have heightened activation in these reward-related regions of the brain to music from adolescents, because this is a time of like really acute, salient reward learning, reward processing, and also more sensitivity to reward cues and social cues, and also a period of time during which individuals just listen to more music. So as a result, even into these are young adults in our study, um, but even for young adults listening to that adolescent music when you know they're more sensitive to social reward, they tend to benefit more from the music from adolescence.
SPEAKER_05Great. As a last follow up question, are there any misunderstandings about the work that you do or that you research, or any just kind of takeaways that the listeners might use? To look at their relationship with music differently or try out tomorrow?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so a lot of my research is focused on music listening rather than musical training. So a lot of individuals at this conference, which is so valid of research, but they focus a lot on musical training. And for me, I grew up working class and didn't have access to musical training as a result of financial barriers. So, but I've always been so interested in music listening. I was in chorus, that's free. Um, but I was always really interested in just music listening and how we can, you know, use music in our day-to-day lives just by pure access of having it on our phones. You know, everybody nowadays has like Spotify or Apple Music or some way to readily, you know, listen to music, and there's not these same financial barriers that other kinds of like music interventions through musical training might have. So I think we as a field and we as individuals should really look at the benefits of just music listening and day-to-day music engagement since it is more accessible for a lot of individuals.
SPEAKER_05That makes so much sense. Thank you so much. Where can people online find out more about your work, or are there any like accounts they might be able to follow you on if they want to learn more?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I am a part of the Mind Lab or the Music Imaging Neurodynamics Lab at Northeastern University as a part of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Health. And you can find us on Instagram at MindLabNEU. Great, thank you so much.
3 MT-BCs' Favorite Parts of SMPC
SPEAKER_05It's the end of day three, SNPC, very, very successful week. Because that's not the weekend. I would say week. Week, the week at SNPC. I have my two music therapy music cognition buddies with me, and we're gonna do a little debrief about our favorite parts. So first, hand it over to Jess.
SPEAKER_03I'm Jess McLean. I'm a music therapist and PhD candidate at Indiana University. So some of my favorite academic moments of the conference, if we want to start there, loved seeing all of the really cool work come out of Miriam Lenz's lab at Vanderbilt. Um, really cool things involving music therapists looking at infant and caregivers' responses during rhythmic social interactions and how blinks are inhibited to increase uh intake of salient information. Um and I think one that's really neat from like a clinical perspective to understand social behaviors that we interact with in sessions, but I also think I I've in general I love rhythm. I'm doing my dissertation on rhythmic, speech, and noise cueing, and I presented on that, and it was really neat to also see a lot of speech and noise work this week. So I would say those were my top academic highlights.
SPEAKER_05And a personal favorite highlight.
SPEAKER_03And a personal favorite highlight, I mean, I think I have to say when we went to get pie at Hoos Your Mama Pie Company, which is, in my personal opinion, the best place in the whole entire world. Just the chicken pot pie there can't be beat, and the coconut cream pie can't be beat. And when you eat them both together, I mean that's that's the best day you'll ever have. Um so that was probably my highlight.
SPEAKER_05Great summary. How about you, Daniel?
SPEAKER_06Um, I'm Daniel Goldschmidt. I'm a music therapist out here. I'm in Minneapolis. I have a music therapy practice called A2 D LLC, and I'm unaffiliated. That's what the academics told me to say. Research-wise, um, the rock star to me of the weekend, not a weekend, was Emily Wood, who did a lot of presentations and got a student award. Um, so I like that one. Also, today I went to a music and well-being set of talks, and there was this there was this one talk that was pretty straightforward, but it just it basically, you know, yada yada showed that when adolescents who are creating plans for if they're suicidal include music in that plan, they tend to report that they're more likely to use that plan than people who don't mention music. And so it's and it's significant. I mean, that feels like something, you know, as a music therapist that could actually affect training on like how to use these plans. Because a lot of, I mean, a lot of clinicians out there have to navigate this when someone mentions suicidality. You know, what is your safety plan? To say if you include music in it, there's a higher chance that someone finds it helpful for themselves. That's huge. So, like, just that one was really cool. I'd say a personal thing and not less academic one was um probably Bria, myself, and our friend Zoe doing um taking a break in the did you mention that this conference was like in an absolutely gorgeous area? Like, we're right next to Lake Michigan, the music school's right on the water. We're late, so we like went and laid in the grass and did like a tarot reading about like things we're navigating in life, and it was just a really sweet way to spend like half of a lunch break. It was very grounded and mindful, which is nice in a conference environment where it's very heady. There's like various like dynamics of social stuff and people that are colleagues and researchers, and people you've read their books, whatever. Yeah, so that was just a really special thing. And then, of course, hanging out with my besties, you know. It's always so nice hanging out with Bria and Jess because we have a good time.
SPEAKER_05Alright, well, my favorite, I had a lot of favorite topics that I thought were really interesting. I'm just gonna mention them because I'm hoping that they will be future episodes of Instrumental, but I got to make some good connections. There was a talk about testing whether autobiographically salient music might be used in psilocybin playlists for psychedelic assisted therapy. Generally, the conventional wisdom has been that you do not use music with understandable lyrics and certainly not with music that's familiar or meaningful to the person. I'm not sure exactly what the meaning behind that was, but there are some researchers starting to look at whether that is actually the case for everybody and whether that keeps things safer or whether that increases insight. Funnily enough, there was a talk, the last talk I went to was about the psychology of Disney music.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that one was really good, actually.
SPEAKER_05It was just kind of whimsical, and I'm looking forward to I think it was Amy King. I'm looking forward to that researcher's line of work and their PhD. And then personally, Evanston's wonderful. I there's just a lot of bunnies around in the public parks here. I just really find that delightful.
SPEAKER_06We love a crater.
SPEAKER_05And I think the other thing is is that when we introduced I don't know, I found that when I introduced myself as a music therapist, I got such an encouraging, welcoming response from everybody. There were at least five music therapists of the three of us, plus two from the Vanderbilt lab that they're working with were here at the conference. Might have been one or two other music therapists, but I can I shout out specific pointer.
SPEAKER_06Oh, sorry. Can I shout out specifically Ella Shalev, um, who's at the Vanderbilt. Um, and we had met two years ago when she was finishing up a music therapy degree, and just like it was a dream of mine like a decade ago to be a music therapist who was doing this stuff, and she's out here, like she presented two different papers, like, and so it's just really cool to have a music therapist like doing that stuff. Um that's just really exciting that because I've I just feel like that's something I've wanted to see in the world for so long and I didn't do. And so it's really nice to see someone doing it and clearly doing a good job.
SPEAKER_03Also, um I met a music therapist who is a postdoc at Johns Hopkins doing rhythmic cueing uh in Parkinson's and uh neurodegeneration, and it was like doing really, really cool stuff. Um and I just think it's really nice to I don't know, I felt like every time we come back to this conference, it's such a good conference, the community is so good. But it's really been really neat to see like an increasing presence of music therapy, whether it's um being used in the studies that people are presenting on, or whether it's uh music therapists themselves like attending and getting benefit out of the conference. And I think it's really a nice thing to be able to showcase research that is actually like applicable to our field from more of like a music science kind of angle.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I mean I can't think of a conference where we've had this many music therapists. I mean, half to a majority are the people presenting or the people doing like music cognition research. Usually we're just like nice observers, you know. You know, occasionally someone presents, but this is like more than it's a majority of us.
SPEAKER_05I agree. I feel like there's the tipping point isn't very high if we can just get like maybe 10 music therapists, a dozen music therapists, but I think the spirit of wanting to collaborate between music science and music therapy is there, and hopefully we'll be back next time. The 2026 SMPC conference spanned three days of talks and events this year, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to make it to the 2028 version, which hasn't been announced yet. Luckily, the International Music Cognition Conference ICMPC will be held in Helsinki, Finland on August 16th through August 20th in 2027. You can find links to SMPC, ICMPC, and the researchers interviewed in this podcast in the show notes. These conferences are a reminder that these music cognition papers aren't just faceless publications, they're real people wrestling with really interesting questions that move our understanding of music science forward. Going to these conferences reminds me that science isn't just something that inevitably happens. It's a process and a community that we can interact with on a closer level than maybe we thought was possible. And who knows, maybe I'll see you at the next SMPC,
