When she was teaching piano to adults and children, Claire Arthur became interested in the vast differences between her students and started asking questions such as, “Why does this seem so easy for one student, but so difficult for another?” 

“I became fascinated with music perception and cognition,” said Arthur, who dove back into academia to find some answers to those questions, and others, receiving her Ph.D. in music theory and cognition from Ohio State University. Today she researches the connections between music and emotion, and music and memory, using computers to perform musical analysis and tying that data to perception and cognition.

“We listen to songs, and they may not have lyrics or semantic content, but it affects us emotionally. I’m interested in uncovering the musical structures and using those structures to try to predict emotional reactions or responses to the music,” said Arthur, whose research includes perceptual experiments as well as computer data analysis and music information retrieval.

Her research also looks at music and perception through a cross-cultural lens. Music has been called the universal language — but it has many different dialects. Part of the work that Arthur and her students are doing involves trying to translate these differences, and perhaps discovering music’s evolutionary purpose in the process.

“Unlike verbal communication, eating, or fornication, there isn’t a clear evolutionary purpose,” Arthur said. “We still don’t know that. Is it just cheesecake, this vestigial thing that came along for the ride and stayed inside of us? We believe there is a great benefit in understanding what the similarities and differences are in the musical systems across different cultures.”