MIT Music Tech Speaker Series Presents: Psyche Loui

This talk explores how brains learn unfamiliar musical structures using the Bohlen-Pierce scale—a tritave-based tuning system—as a culturally neutral research paradigm. By studying learners , this work reveals fundamental mechanisms of musical enculturation and lowers barriers to understanding how anyone can develop musical fluency.

Through EEG, MRI, and behavioral studies, I demonstrate that humans can rapidly learn to predict musical structure, and that liking emerges from learned predictions. Neural signatures reveal hierarchical predictive processing as the brain builds new expectations, with timbre serving as crucial scaffolding for learning novel pitch structures. Individual differences in musical training, amusia, and musical anhedonia illuminate dissociable systems underlying prediction versus reward. I extend these findings to understanding creativity and health applications, including studies in musical improvisation and imagination, attention enhancement in ADHD, and gamma-frequency stimulation for cognitive health in aging. Together these results illustrate how alternative tuning systems advance music technology to serve human health and creativity.

Speaker Bio:

Psyche Loui is Associate Professor of Creativity and Creative Practice and Associate Dean of Research for the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. Her research expertise spans music cognition, neuroscience, and brain health, with a particular focus on understanding how musical experience shapes the brain across the lifespan. As director of the MIND (Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics) Lab, she investigates the neural mechanisms underlying musical perception, learning, and emotion. Her work bridges cognitive science, neuroscience, and the arts, examining questions from how we perceive musical structure to how music supports health and social bonding. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Grammy Foundation. Her work advances our understanding of the impact of music on human cognition and society.

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