Prof Ian Cross

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.

A related project conducted with Neta Spiro and David Duncan explores what happens when strangers sing together on first encounter. Starting from the well-established finding that people feel an increased sense of connection after having sung together, we pose the question of whether the joint singing has to be in tune — to sound good — for that sense of connection to emerge. Spoiler alert: it seems not… (see Spiro, Duncan & Cross, 2026).

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 more directly 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 was 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 now in progress.

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, the Royal Northern College of Music, the Centre for Performance Science at the Royal College of Music and the Conservatoire royale de Bruxelles.

Ian Cross is happy to consider applications from prospective students who wish to work on topics in his areas of interest, and invites them to contact him prior to making a formal application.