The Music Lab at Harvard University is hiring

If you are reading this message, you are probably doing so on a device that plays music. You are probably able to hear and perceive that music and you probably can also produce music of your own, even if you’ve never had music lessons. You are probably motivated to engage with music on a regular basis, regardless of your cultural background, location in the world, or socioeconomic status. You have probably been this way your whole life.

In the Music Lab, we’re figuring out why the human mind is designed in such a way that all of the above is true. We do basic science, running experiments with typically developing people of all ages and in populations with genetic conditions. We focus in particular on infancy and on people who live in isolated small-scale societies around the world. We also work on large corpus studies of ethnographies and field recordings from the Natural History of Song project and use those data in large-scale online experiments.

The Music Lab is the newest lab in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. We collaborate domestically and internationally with cognitive scientists, musicians, evolutionary biologists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, linguists, and computer scientists. We are recruiting research assistants and students from all of these fields to work on a few key topics: universals in music perception and music production, people’s use of music in daily life, acoustics of music production in informal settings, studies of the impact of infant-directed song on infant affect and behavior, and long-term effects of the use of music in the home on parent and infant health. If you find any of this exciting, please get in touch, regardless of your academic background or career stage.

We will be considering a wide variety of candidates for several positions, listed in more detail at www.themusiclab.org/jobs. The schedule for hiring is flexible, with positions starting on or after 1 September 2017. Applications will be reviewed as they are received. To apply, contact us at musiclab+jobs@g.harvard.edu. Tell us why you are applying, what your research interests are, and which of the below positions you are most interested in. Include a CV and contact information for two references.

The Music Lab is directed by Samuel Mehr and is funded by the High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program at the National Institutes of Health and by the Harvard University Data Science Initiative.