Roles
Biography
I am Emeritus Professsor of Music & Science, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, having retired as Director of the Centre for Music and Science (CMS) in 2021. I am presently Principal Investigator for a Leverhulme Trust-funded research project, Score Design for music reading: cognitive and artistic perspectives, and am actively involved in a range of other ongoing research projects. I taught undergraduate and graduate courses for the Faculty of Music and supervised a substantial number of graduate students (see my page on the CMS website) as well as founding the CMS, where research investigates music from many different scientific perspectives as reflected in the wide range of publications by its past and present members (see, e.g., blogs at https://musicatcambridge.wordpress.com/). I am Editor-in-Chief of SAGE's online Open Access journal with SEMPRE, Music & Science, publishing research across the field of music and science as broadly conceived (e.g., a recent Special Collection of papers arising from experiments conducted on concert performances by the Danish String Quartet integrates physiological, cognitive-behavioural, aesthetic, ethical and logistic perspectives: see the Launch Event on October 2023 at RITMO, Universitetet i Oslo, on Youtube). I am on the advisory boards of several institutions, journals and research projects, was a Governor and Chair of the Research Committee of the Music Therapy Charity until 2025, am a Trustee of SEMPRE and Chair of Trustees of KJV Community Choir. I am also a guitarist with an LRAM (guitar, performance) from the Royal College of Music and an ARCM (guitar, teaching) from the Royal Academy of Music, having studied, amongst others, with Tim Walker.
For more information see Ian Cross's page on the CMS website.
Research
I have undertaken research into many different aspects of music: experiments in music cognition have explored the nature of our experience of tonal and rhythmic structures (see, e.g., Cross et al., 1983), as well as the mechanisms that shape those experiences; a Leverhulme Trust-funded project with Professors Jim Woodhouse and Brian Moore (in the Departments of Engineering and Psychology, respectively) studied the perceptual correlates of violin acoustics (see, e.g., Fritz et al, 2007); and projects in experimental archaeology have investigated the sound-producing potential of lithic artefacts and the possibility of their identification in the archaeological record (see Cross et al, 2002; Blake & Cross, 2015). I have also written extensively on the relationships between music and processes of evolution (see OUP blog).
I have a number of ongoing and just-completed research projects exploring the dynamics and effects of music as an interactive medium. One derives from my work on music and evolution, and focuses on the cognitive processes underlying spontaneous interaction in speech and music (with Sarah Hawkins, Cambridge, and Richard Ogden, University of York). The project has been further developed to incorporate motion-capture data, in collaboration with Carlos Cornejo, Daniel Party (both of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago) and Juan Pablo Robledo (Université de Lorraine), and a paper detailing results is available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250166. A current project with Juan Pablo, Michelle Phillips (RNCM) and Jason Taylor and Josie Kearney (University of Manchester) aims to develop these findings by applying dual-EEG (hyperscanning) to explore how the neural activity of non-experts making music together may be modulated by that experience.
In a Rayson Huang lecture (University of Hong Kong, April 2021) I drew on the results of the Chilean study and other recent experiments to argue that speech in the phatic register and music as interaction can both be interpreted as manifestations of a superordinate category of affiliative communicative interaction. I develop these ideas in another paper (psyarxiv.com/tr9n6) to suggest that what we construe as musical events may be better understood as the traces of human interaction mediated by interactive affordances that help achieve affiliative alignment. A recent keynote address (All together now: music, law and affiliative interaction) for the 12th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) in York further develops these ideas and situates affiliative communicative interaction at the heart of the idea of a society of laws.
A rather more applied project explored the development of a music-based intervention to enhance perinatal mental health in The Gambia, which produced very promising results (see Sanfilippo et al, 2020). The project involved a number of participants, and is led by Lauren Stewart (University of Roehampton) and Katie Rose Sanfilippo (City, University of London), with Vivette Glover and Victoria Cornelius (Imperial College London) and myself and Paul Ramchandani (University of Cambridge) as UK Co-Investigators, with Bonnie McConnell (Australian National University), Buba Darboe (Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, the Gambia), and Hassoum Ceessay (National Centre of Arts and Culture, the Gambia) as International Co-Investigators, and Hajara Huma, a Registered Nurse, as the project's Gambian Research Assistant. The project website at https://www.chimeproject.com/ contains the latest updates, a project video is now on YouTube, and a larger-scale follow-up project is imminent.
A current research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled Score Design for music reading: cognitive and artistic perspectives, started in January 2023. It is being conducted by myself as PI with Arild Stenberg as Senior Research Associate, David Duncan as Research Assistant, and a PhD student, Katya Ness. It emerges from the results of Dr Stenberg's PhD research (reported in brief in Stenberg & Cross, 2019) on the effects of small modifications to the standard design of musical scores on sight-reading performance; we found that the introduction of vertically-oriented white spaces across staves could lead to more accurate and fluent sightreading. We are following up these results and aiming to understand more broadly how musicians engage with, use, and modify musical notation, with the participation of teachers and students at the Faculty of Music in Cambridge, at the Conservatoire royale de Bruxelles.
Publications
For a more complete list and access to preprints of papers and chapters, see my profile at Google Scholar.
Selected publications over last five years:
Reybrouck, M. & Cross, I. (2025, in press). Music listening as an evolutionary achievement: ecosemiotic and biosemiotic claims. To appear in Vouoskoski, J., Schiavio, A. and Kim, Y. (Eds) Music and the cognitive humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cross, I. and Spiro, N. (2025, in press). Intersubjectivity in performance. To appear in M. Doğantan-Dack (Ed.), The Music Performer’s Lived Experiences. (pp. 188-203). New York & London: Routledge.
Cheston, H., Schlichting, J. L., Cross, I., & Harrison, P. M. C. (2024). Rhythmic qualities of jazz improvisation predict performer identity and style in source-separated audio recordings. Royal Society Open Science, 11(11), 240920 [https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240920]
Cross, I. (2024). Music as formative social action. In N. Thieberger, A. Harris, S. Treloyn & M. Turpin (Eds.) Keeping Time: Dialogues on Music and Archives in Honour of Linda Barwick. (pp. 256-268). Sydney: University of Sydney Press.
Cheston, H., Cross, I. & Harrison, P. (2024). Trade-offs in Coordination Strategies for Networked Jazz Performances. Music Perception. 42(1), 48–72 [https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2024.42.1.48]
Cheston H, Schlichting JL, Cross I, & Harrison PMC. (2024). Jazz Trio Database: Automated Annotation of Jazz Piano Trio Recordings Processed Using Audio Source Separation. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 7(1), 144–158. [https://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.186]
Zhang, X. & Cross, I. (2024). Singers' Realization of Linguistic Tones in Chaozhou Song. Ethnomusicology, 68(2), 247-275. [https://doi.org/10.5406/21567417.68.2.06]
Cross, I. (2024). Sharing uncertainty: music in humanistic and scientific understandings. Musicae Scientiae. 28(2), 222-236. [https://doi.org/10.1177/10298649231197388]
Spiro, N., Sanfilippo, K. R. M., McConnell, B. B., Pike-Rowney, G., Bonini Baraldi, F., Brabec, B., et al. (2023). Perspectives on Musical Care Throughout the Life Course: Introducing the Musical Care International Network. Music & Science, 6, 20592043231200553. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20592043231200553]
Cross, I. (2023). Music in the digital age: commodity, community, communion. AI & Society [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01670-9]
Sanfilippo K. R. M., Glover V., Cornelius V., Amiel Castro R., McConnell B., Darboe B., Huma H. B., Gaye M., Ceesay H., Ramchandani P., Cross I. & Stewart L. (2023) Expressions of Antenatal Symptoms of Common Mental Disorders in The Gambia and the UK. BMJ Open, 13:e066807 [https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/13/7/e066807]
Yu, Christine Guo, Blackwell, Alan F., & Cross, Ian (2023) Perception of Rhythmic Agency for Conversational Labelling. Human Computer Interaction, 38(1): 25-48. [https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2021.1877541]
Robledo, J. P , Cross, I., Boada-Bayona, L. & Demogeot, N. (2022). Back to basics; a re-evaluation of the role of imprinting in the genesis of Bowlby’s attachment theory. Frontiers in Psychology, 13 [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1033746/full]
Cross, I. (2022) Music, speech and affiliative communicative interaction: pitch and rhythm as interactive affordances. PsyArXiv. May 9. psyarxiv.com/tr9n6
Cross, I. (2022). Music, Memory and Narrative: The Art of Telling in Tale of Tales. Animation, 17(3), 334-346. [https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477221114596]
Lillywhite, A., Nijhof, D., Glowinski, D., Giordano, B. L., Camurri, A., Cross, I., & Pollick, F. (2022). A functional magnetic resonance imaging examination of audiovisual observation of a point-light string quartet using intersubject correlation and physical feature analysis. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16. [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.921489]
Sanfilippo, K. R., Spiro, N. & Cross, I. (2022). Synthesis: the future of musical care. In Katie Rose Sanfilippo & Neta Spiro (Eds.) Collaborative Insights (pp146.166). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacIntyre, A. D., Lo, H. Y. J., Cross, I., & Scott, S. (2022). Task-irrelevant auditory metre shapes visuomotor sequential learning. Psychological Research [https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01690-y]
Dunbar, R. I.M., Robledo del Canto J. P., Tamarit, I., Cross, I. & Smith, E, (2022). Nonverbal Auditory Cues Allow Relationship Quality to be Inferred During Conversations. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 46, 1-18. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-021-00386-y]
Stewart L., McConnell B., Darboe B., Glover V., Huma H. B., Sanfilippo K. R. M., Cross I., Ceesay H., Ramchandani P. & Cornelius V. (2021). Social Singing, Culture and Health: Interdisciplinary Insights from the CHIME project for Perinatal Mental Health. Health Promotion International, 1–8 [https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daab210]
Carlson, E. & Cross, I. (2021). Reopening the conversation between music psychology and music therapy: a survey of interdisciplinary attitudes. Music Perception, 39(2): 181-201. [https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2021.39.2.181]
Cross, I. (2021) Music, attachment and uncertainty: music as communicative interaction. Commentary on Music as a coevolved system for social bonding (Savage, Loui, Tarr, Schachner, Glowacki, Mithen & Fitch); and Origins of music in credible signalling (Mehr, Krasnow, Bryant & Hagen). Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 44, e6. [ https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20001028 ]
Zhang, X. & Cross, I. (2021). Analysing the Relationships between Tone and Melody in Chaozhou Songs. Journal of New Music Research. [ https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2021.1974490 ]
Cao, E., Blinderman, C. D. and Cross, I. (2021). Reconsidering empathy: an interpersonal approach and participatory arts in the medical humanities. Journal of Medical Humanities. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-021-09701-6]
Robledo, J. P., Hawkins, S., Cornejo, C., Cross, I., Party, D., & Hurtado, E. (2021). Musical improvisation enhances interpersonal coordination in subsequent conversation: Motor and speech evidence. PLOS ONE, 16(4), e0250166. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250166]
Harris, I. & Cross, I. (2021). Investigating Everyday Musical Interaction During COVID-19: An Experimental Procedure for Collaborative Playlist Engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 12(1006). [https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.647967]
Cross, I. & Tolbert, E. (2020). Epistemologies. In T. McAuley, J. Levinson, and N. Nielsen (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, (pp265-282), Oxford, Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199367313.013.14]
Sanfilippo, K. R. M., McConnell, B., Cornelius, V., Darboe, B., Huma, H. B., Gaye, M., Ceesay, M., Ramchandani, P., Cross, I., Glover, V. & Stewart, L. (2020). Community psychosocial music intervention (CHIME) to reduce antenatal common mental disorder symptoms in The Gambia: a feasibility trial. BMJ Open, 10(11), e040287. [paper]
Bravo, F., Cross, I., Hopkins, C., Gonzalez, N., Docampo, J., Bruno, C. & Stamatakis, E.A. (2020), Anterior Cingulate and Medial Prefrontal Cortex Response to Systematically Controlled Tonal Dissonance during Passive Music Listening. Human Brain Mapping, [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.24786].
Teaching and Supervisions
Ian Cross is no longer accepting new graduate students. For a list of doctoral students and topics previously supervised, please see:
Ian Cross's CMS page
