Andrew Goldman

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Andrew Goldman is assistant professor of music in music theory at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and assistant professor of cognitive science at the IU College of Arts and Sciences.

He earned a Ph.D. from the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge in 2015. Goldman was in the inaugural cohort of Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University from 2015 to 2018 and held a postdoctoral position with the Music, Cognition, and the Brain Initiative at Western University before joining the faculty at IU in 2020.

Music is an artform with powerful capacities to express emotions, unite or divide groups of people, communicate concrete and abstract forms of meaning, sanctify rituals, regulate mood, and more. There are many ways we might go about trying to understand music: analyzing its sounds, looking into its history, comparing styles, investigating the cultural meaning of musical practices, considering how people use music in their lives, and using scientific methods to explain the musical mind.

This last form of inquiry, which can broadly be called music cognition studies, perhaps has a reputation for being the most objective—if you want to know how music really works, do a scientific study! If you want to avoid bias, appeal to science. There is a sense that experimental data do not lie, or perhaps even that they speak for themselves, as though their conclusions were self-evident.

In his IU Presidential Arts & Humanities project, Goldman challenges this notion: while science may indeed provide a special kind of understanding, the people who do science, and the musicians making the music, are still operating within a particular cultural and historical context that gives scientific work a perspective. Music cognition findings are contingent on this perspective.

Goldman's first research question, then, is how a researcher’s perspective influences their scientific work. He calls this influence the “weak form” of contingency. He considers how all the other contemporary research on music guides how scientific questions actually get asked in the laboratory. In doing a scientific experiment with musicians, scientists must define what they seek to explain—capacities like “creativity” and abilities like “improvisation” are identified and defined in other, non-scientific literatures, which then influences how scientists go about designing laboratory tasks to examine them. The upshot is that different non-scientific theories of music would motivate different scientific experiments and explanations. This does not make any particular research unscientific—the scientific method still provides a special form of knowledge—but it shows how scientific work is dependent on and influenced by its broader scholarly context.

Professor Goldman's second research question asks how the situation of musicians themselves influences scientific research. He calls this form of influence the “strong form” of contingency. One might expect human musicality to be a fixed set of capacities, perhaps inherited through evolution, that allow us to engage in musical behaviors. But, musical practices are quite diverse, dependent on culture and technology; so, the alternative, strongly contingent view is that humans use their minds to be musical rather than simply having musical minds. This shift in language is important: different musical tasks allow different mental capacities to be applied, and there may not be an essential musical mind. What musicality is, in other words, depends on what musical practices one does.

To make this work concrete, for each of these questions Goldman will produce case studies in the form of journal articles and public-facing presentations, demonstrating how these forms of contingency influence scientific work. He will focus on two particular musical capacities: creativity, and musical syntax (i.e., how people learn the “rules” of music). He chose these two topics because they well-exemplify these two forms of contingency, and because he has done original experimental work on them.

This work fits into a broader context as the field of music cognition is turning back to cross-cultural comparative work, and as researchers acknowledge the need for diversity in its researchers, topics, and experimental participants. There is a desire in the field to learn which aspects of musical cognition are universal, as well as to learn more about music cognition through cross-cultural comparisons. The present work contributes to these trends by directly analyzing—as a topic in itself—the different ways the situation of both musicians and researchers can influence scientific research.