Krumhansl, Carol

Committees | International Advisory Board (IAB)

Carol Krumhansl

Carol Lynne Krumhansl is Professor of Psychology and a member of the graduate fields of Music and Cognitive Science at Cornell University. The Music Cognition Laboratory, founded in 1980, has studied a wide range of topics.  The experiments on tonality, pitch, and harmony helped establish the psychological reality of music-theoretic concepts. Contemporary proposals on melodic structure and musical tension have been tested and extended to music from other cultures and post-tonal music. Other research topics are rhythm and meter, perception of time, perceptual-motor synchronization, timbre, musical development, emotional responses, and multi-modal evaluations of musical performances. Recent research has used popular music to study memory representations and associated autobiographical memories. A long-standing interest is the application of mathematical models to represent patterns in music.

Krumhansl is the author of Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch (Oxford University Press) and numerous journal articles. She has held visiting appointments at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, IRCAM, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, UCSD, and the University of Jyväskylä, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in musicology. She is past-president of SMPC and the 2011 recipient of the SMPC Achievement Award, and has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations. Krumhansl is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.