Photo of chorus rehearsal at Colgate University
Music creates a sense of collective identity and community — but how? Professors Bruce Hansen and Caroline Keating, from Colgate’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Assistant Professor Sinhaeng Lee, from the Department of Music, deploy mobile, non-invasive, neural activity recording technologies to investigate whether choral directors’ use of gestures, postures, gazes, and facial expressions synchronize individual choristers’ physiological and brain wave patterns in ways that enhance performance and transform individuated “selves” into a collective identity.
This project is jointly funded with the Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative. It also received support from the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute, for which the recipients are grateful.