How we experience music and why it matters
Ming Hsu, Professor
Business, Haas School
Check back for status
This project will apply neuroscientific tools and insights to address a problem that has bedeviled businesses, legal scholars, and policymakers—how to more objectively determine whether a work of art is “based on plagiarism” or is “obscene”. In music copyright, for example, a key question is whether two works are “substantially similar” according to some group of “ordinary listeners”. However, questions of what substantially similar means, or who the ordinary listeners are, are left almost entirely to the discretion of the judge or jury.
In this project we are building on some of our past work to develop a brain-based measure of similarity and copyright infringement between musical works. Crucially, we will compare works from historic copyright disputes involving well known artists, such as Queen, Vanilla Ice, Marvin Gaye, and Pharrell Williams. Ultimately, this work has potentially both academic and commercial interest: it will (1) make novel contributions to the burgeoning field of Neurolaw and (2) provide legal practitioners with a new, potent form of evidence in copyright infringement litigation.
Role: Apprentices will gain exposure and experience to cutting-edge research of human cognition and neuroscientific applications to law by assisting on multiple aspects of conducting experiments using electroencephalography (EEG).
Duties will include:
(1) Participant recruitment
(2) EEG data collection and quality assurance
(3) Analysis of behavioral and neural data
Qualifications: Must have:
- Interest in cognitive neuroscience, law (especially intellectual property), or the intersection of the two.
- Previous experience running EEG studies with human subjects
Desirable:
- Familiarity with statistical software (eg. R or MATLAB)
- Knowledge of music composition or copyright law
Hours: to be negotiated
Social Sciences Education, Cognition & Psychology Digital Humanities and Data Science