Nori Jacoby: What Can Rhythm Tell Us about Cognition?

Friday, March 3, 2017 - 2:00pm to Saturday, March 4, 2017 - 1:55pm
622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University, New York NY 10027     map

Nori Jacoby, Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University, will deliver the talk, "What Can Rhythm Tell Us About Cognition? Insights from Iterated Reproduction," as part of the Historical Musicology and Music Theory Colloquium series.

Nori Jacoby is a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and holds a M.A. in mathematics from the same institution. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the McDermott Computational Audition Lab in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT, and a visiting postdoctoral researcher in Tom Griffiths's Computational Cognitive Science Lab at Berkeley. His primary research interests focus on the role of culture in auditory perception, using iterated learning alongside classical psychophysical methods to characterize perceptual biases in music and speech rhythms in various populations around the world. Previous work has focused on the the application of machine-learning techniques to model aspects of musical syntax ranging from tonal harmony and birdsong to the perception of musical form. Nori’s work has appeared in journals including Current BiologyNatureNature Scientific ReportsPhilosophical Transactions BJournal of NeuroscienceJournal of Vision, and Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. In his free time, Nori enjoys writing music for overtone singers.