Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
Biographic Data
| ID | 1645275 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth Hellmuth |
| FAMILY NAME | Margulis |
| SIGNATURE | MARGULIS E H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0250-8348 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Music-induced spontaneous thought reflects individual differences in creativity
Creativity has traditionally been difficult to measure, partly because it is linked to a diverse set of mental processes that are considered stimulus-independent, like daydreaming and imagining. Music, however, provides a tractable window into these varieties of spontaneous thought. During music listening, people regularly imagine fictional scenarios that feel highly personal, but are actually prompted by features of the music. Here we show that …
Sequence Generation and Evaluation
Music is often considered an important domain for creativity. Traditional studies of musical creativity have examined musical improvisation using jazz as a model. While this approach has yielded many valuable insights about creativity's cognitive and neural mechanisms, it has limited the study sample to those with the means to engage in improvisation within one specific Western style. Here we introduce a novel tool for assessing musical creativit…
Imaginings from an unfamiliar world
Human imagination is generative and creative yet deeply rooted in culture and familiarity.Recent studies have quantified the effects of culture on stories that are imagined during music listening, but the music used in previous work was always drawn from a tradition familiar to participants from at least one of the cultures.Here we report the first study of imagined stories to music written in a musical system that is novel to participants from e…
Thoughtscapes in music
Music listening can evoke a wide range of thought types, including autobiographical memories, fictional stories, visual imagery, and mind-wandering. Previous studies have typically examined these thought types individually, which precludes investigation of why certain music evokes certain thought types over others. This study investigates the impact of musical genre, familiarity, enjoyment, contrast, and emotional expression on the occurrence of …
Rapid Learning and Long-term Memory in the Speech-to-song Illusion
The speech-to-song illusion is a perceptual transformation in which a spoken phrase initially heard as speech begins to sound like song across repetitions. In two experiments, we tested whether phrase-specific learning and memory processes engaged by repetition contribute to the illusion. In Experiment 1, participants heard 16 phrases across two conditions. In both conditions, participants heard eight repetitions of each phrase and rated their ex…
Music-Evoked Thoughts
Music listening can evoke a range of extra-musical thoughts, from colors and smells to autobiographical memories and fictional stories. We investigated music-evoked thoughts as an overarching category, to examine how the music’s genre and emotional expression, as well as familiarity with the style and liking of individual excerpts, predicted the occurrence, type, novelty, and valence of thoughts. We selected 24 unfamiliar, instrumental music exce…
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be …
When did that happen? The dynamic unfolding of perceived musical narrative
Intersubjectivity and Shared Dynamic Structure in Narrative Imaginings to Music
This paper digests a recent body of empirical work on narrative imaginings to music, bringing them into dialogue with existing theoretical frameworks. By examining the stories imagined at three geographic locations using various methods, these studies present converging evidence that intuitive imaginings to music can be strikingly similar across individuals, but only when they share a cultural background. The intersubjectivity of these imaginings…
What Drives Narrative Engagement With Music
Although people across multiple cultures have been shown to experience music narratively, it has proven difficult to disentangle whether narrative dimensions of music derive from learned extramusical associations within a culture or from less experience-dependent elements of the music, such as musical contrast. Toward this end, two experiments investigated factors contributing to listeners’ narrative engagement with music, comparing the narrative…
Do you hear what I hear? Perceived narrative constitutes a semantic dimension for music
Repetition
Repetition lies at the core of musical practice, yet resists easy characterization. This chapter takes a perceptual approach to understanding its function, distinguishing acoustic repetition from notated repetition from perceived repetition, and exploring the paradoxical way that repeating sounds can give rise to perceptions of difference. Relying on analytic examples, it outlines three standard functions for musical repetition. First, repetition…
Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition
Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys t…
Embracing Anti-Racist Practices in the Music Perception and Cognition Community
This past summer, the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery in the United States led to public outcry and international protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and broader awareness of the effects of systemic racism. Following these events, many organizations have reflected critically on how they participate in practices that marginalize underrepresented members of their community. The Society for Musi…
Music Similarity
Similarity is fundamental to our experience of the world (Goldstone & Son, 2005), and to our experience of music in particular. Accordingly, modelling music similarity is crucial for researching mu
Catching an Earworm Through Movement
Earworms, also known as Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI), are fragments of music that get stuck on mental replay. This study investigates the hypothesis that overt motorinvolvement (in the form of humming, singing, tapping or moving) and imagined motor involvement (in the form of imagining a continuation to an interrupted melody) induces INMI more frequently than passive music listening. Fourgroups of listeners heard one of four songs known to …
Timbre priming effects and expectation in melody
In this study, participants identified the timbre of pitches when they occurred in isolation, and again when they occurred appended to short melodies. For pitches congruent with the melody, timbre identification generally improved when the pitches were appended to the melody in comparison to when they occurred in isolation. In addition, the amount of improvement was broadly consistent with theoretical accounts of the degree to which the pitches w…
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be …
Timbre priming effects and expectation in melody
In this study, participants identified the timbre of pitches when they occurred in isolation, and again when they occurred appended to short melodies. For pitches congruent with the melody, timbre identification generally improved when the pitches were appended to the melody in comparison to when they occurred in isolation. In addition, the amount of improvement was broadly consistent with theoretical accounts of the degree to which the pitches w…
Catching an Earworm Through Movement
Earworms, also known as Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI), are fragments of music that get stuck on mental replay. This study investigates the hypothesis that overt motorinvolvement (in the form of humming, singing, tapping or moving) and imagined motor involvement (in the form of imagining a continuation to an interrupted melody) induces INMI more frequently than passive music listening. Fourgroups of listeners heard one of four songs known to …
Music Similarity
Similarity is fundamental to our experience of the world (Goldstone & Son, 2005), and to our experience of music in particular. Accordingly, modelling music similarity is crucial for researching mu
Repetition
Repetition lies at the core of musical practice, yet resists easy characterization. This chapter takes a perceptual approach to understanding its function, distinguishing acoustic repetition from notated repetition from perceived repetition, and exploring the paradoxical way that repeating sounds can give rise to perceptions of difference. Relying on analytic examples, it outlines three standard functions for musical repetition. First, repetition…
Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition
Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys t…
Embracing Anti-Racist Practices in the Music Perception and Cognition Community
This past summer, the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery in the United States led to public outcry and international protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and broader awareness of the effects of systemic racism. Following these events, many organizations have reflected critically on how they participate in practices that marginalize underrepresented members of their community. The Society for Musi…
What Drives Narrative Engagement With Music
Although people across multiple cultures have been shown to experience music narratively, it has proven difficult to disentangle whether narrative dimensions of music derive from learned extramusical associations within a culture or from less experience-dependent elements of the music, such as musical contrast. Toward this end, two experiments investigated factors contributing to listeners’ narrative engagement with music, comparing the narrative…
Do you hear what I hear? Perceived narrative constitutes a semantic dimension for music
When did that happen? The dynamic unfolding of perceived musical narrative
Intersubjectivity and Shared Dynamic Structure in Narrative Imaginings to Music
This paper digests a recent body of empirical work on narrative imaginings to music, bringing them into dialogue with existing theoretical frameworks. By examining the stories imagined at three geographic locations using various methods, these studies present converging evidence that intuitive imaginings to music can be strikingly similar across individuals, but only when they share a cultural background. The intersubjectivity of these imaginings…
Rapid Learning and Long-term Memory in the Speech-to-song Illusion
The speech-to-song illusion is a perceptual transformation in which a spoken phrase initially heard as speech begins to sound like song across repetitions. In two experiments, we tested whether phrase-specific learning and memory processes engaged by repetition contribute to the illusion. In Experiment 1, participants heard 16 phrases across two conditions. In both conditions, participants heard eight repetitions of each phrase and rated their ex…
Music-Evoked Thoughts
Music listening can evoke a range of extra-musical thoughts, from colors and smells to autobiographical memories and fictional stories. We investigated music-evoked thoughts as an overarching category, to examine how the music’s genre and emotional expression, as well as familiarity with the style and liking of individual excerpts, predicted the occurrence, type, novelty, and valence of thoughts. We selected 24 unfamiliar, instrumental music exce…
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be …
Imaginings from an unfamiliar world
Human imagination is generative and creative yet deeply rooted in culture and familiarity.Recent studies have quantified the effects of culture on stories that are imagined during music listening, but the music used in previous work was always drawn from a tradition familiar to participants from at least one of the cultures.Here we report the first study of imagined stories to music written in a musical system that is novel to participants from e…
Thoughtscapes in music
Music listening can evoke a wide range of thought types, including autobiographical memories, fictional stories, visual imagery, and mind-wandering. Previous studies have typically examined these thought types individually, which precludes investigation of why certain music evokes certain thought types over others. This study investigates the impact of musical genre, familiarity, enjoyment, contrast, and emotional expression on the occurrence of …
Music-induced spontaneous thought reflects individual differences in creativity
Creativity has traditionally been difficult to measure, partly because it is linked to a diverse set of mental processes that are considered stimulus-independent, like daydreaming and imagining. Music, however, provides a tractable window into these varieties of spontaneous thought. During music listening, people regularly imagine fictional scenarios that feel highly personal, but are actually prompted by features of the music. Here we show that …
Sequence Generation and Evaluation
Music is often considered an important domain for creativity. Traditional studies of musical creativity have examined musical improvisation using jazz as a model. While this approach has yielded many valuable insights about creativity's cognitive and neural mechanisms, it has limited the study sample to those with the means to engage in improvisation within one specific Western style. Here we introduce a novel tool for assessing musical creativit…
Psychology (17 works) · Cognitive psychology (13 works) · Neuroscience and Music Perception (13 works) · Art (11 works) · Musical (10 works) · Visual arts (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Diverse Music Education Insights (7 works) · Music and Audio Processing (7 works) · Cognitive science (6 works)