New insights into the music of Bach and Chopin published in Frontiers in Psychology (Cognition)

Great minds ranging from Plato to Darwin have posited that music’s power to convey emotion stems in part from its parallels to emotional speech. Matt Poon (lab alum ’12) explored this intriguing issue by working with Dr. Schutz to quantify the use of cues such as pitch height and attack rate in “balanced” corpus of major/minor key pieces – Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Chopin’s Preludes for piano. This article now appears in a special edition of Frontiers in Psychology.