Dr Manuel Anglada-Tort
I am a Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of Music and lead the Music, Culture, and Cognition (MCC) Lab at the University of Oxford. I am also a visiting researcher in the Computational Auditory Perception Group at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics.
I am interested in understanding the psychological and cultural foundations of music and aesthetic behaviour, and the role they play in human societies and cultural evolution. To explore this, my research combines large-scale behavioural experiments with innovative psychological paradigms from different disciplines, including psychology, psychoacoustics, musicology, cultural evolution, computational sociology, machine learning, cross-cultural research, and network science. For example, I use high-resolution perceptual paradigms to study how people construct mental representations of vast stimulus spaces, such as musical rhythms, melodies, or visual art; I use interactive transmission experiments to simulate cultural evolution in the lab, exploring how thousands of participants create and transmit music over generations; and I use big data approaches to measure real-world patterns of cultural consumption and globalization.
My published work (see Publications) covers a variety of research topics, including the psychology of music, auditory perception, empirical aesthetics, production and consumption of creative work, popularity dynamics, collective cognition, and cultural evolution.
Please get in touch if you are interested in working together, student supervision, or have any specific questions.
2023
Anglada-Tort, M., Harrison, P. M., Lee, H., & Jacoby, N. (2023). Large-scale singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanism underlying music evolution. Current Biology, 33, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.070
Anglada-Tort, M., Lee, H., Krause, A. E., & North, A. C. (2023). Here comes the sun: music features of popular songs reflect prevailing weather conditions. Royal Society Open Science, 10, 221443. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221443
Steffens, J., & Anglada-Tort, M. (2023). The effect of visual recognition on listener choices when searching for music in playlists. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000562
2022
Anglada-Tort, M., Harrison, P. M. C., & Jacoby, N. (2022): REPP: A robust cross-platform solution for online sensorimotor synchronization experiments. Behavioral Research Methods 4, 2271–2285 (2022). Doi: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01722-2
Anglada-Tort, M., Harrison, P. M. C., & Jacoby, N. (2022). Studying the effect of oral transmission on melodic structure using online singing experiments. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44(44). Doi: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3567q2vf
Niarchou, M., Gustavson, D. J., Sathirapongsasuti, F., Anglada-Tort, M., …, Jacoby, N., & Gordon R. L. (2022): Unravelling the genetic architecture of musical rhythm: a large-scale genome-wide association study of beat synchronization. Nature Human Behaviour 6, 1292–1309 (2022). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01359-x
Anglada-Tort, M., Masters, N., Steffens, J., North, A., & Müllensiefen, D. (2023). The Behavioural Economics of Music: Systematic review and future directions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(5), 1177–1194. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221113761
Anglada-Tort, M., Schofield, K., Trahan, T., & Müllensiefen, D. (2022). I’ve heard that brand before: the role of music recognition on consumer choice. International Journal of Advertising, 1-20. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2022.2060568
2021
Jacoby, N., Polak, R., Grahn, J., Cameron, D. J., Lee, K. M., Godoy, R., … Anglada-Tort, M., Harrison, P. M. C., McPherson, M. J., Dolan, S., Durange, A., & Mcdermott, J. (2021, July 6). Universality and cross-cultural variation in mental representations of music revealed by global comparison of rhythm priors. Preprint Doi: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/b879v
Savage, P. E., Jacoby, N., Margulis, E. H., Daikoku, H., Anglada- Tort, M., ... (2021). Building sustainable global collaborative networks: Recommendations from music studies and the social sciences. In E. H. Margulis, D. Loughridge, & P. Loui (Eds.), The science-music borderlands: Reckoning with the past, imagining the future. MIT Press. Preprint Doi: http://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cb4ys
Anglada-Tort, M., Krause, A. E., & North, A. C. (2021). Popular music lyrics and musicians’ gender over time: A computational approach. Psychology of Music, 49(3), 426-444. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735619871602
Anglada-Tort, M., Keller, S., Steffens, J., & Müllensiefen, D. (2021): The impact of source effects on the evaluation of music for advertising: Are there differences in how advertising professionals and consumers judge music? Journal of Advertising Research, 61(1), 95-109. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2501/JAR-2020-016
2020
Anglada-Tort, M., & Skov, M. (2020): What counts as Aesthetics in Science? A bibliometric Analysis and Visualization of the Scientific Literature from 1970 to 2018. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 16(3), 553–568. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000350
Harrison, P. M. C., Marjieh, R., Adolfi, F., van Rijn, P., Anglada-Tort, M., Tchernichovski, O., Larrouy-Maestri, P., & Jacoby, N.(2020). Gibbs Sampling with People. 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020). Doi: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02595
2019
Anglada-Tort, M., Steffens, J., & Müllensiefen, D. (2019): Names and titles matter: The impact of linguistic fluency and the affect heuristic on aesthetics and value judgements of music. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13 (3), 277-292. Doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/aca0000172
Anglada-Tort, M. (2019): Measuring stereotypes in music: A commentary on Susino and Schubert (2019). Empirical Musicology Review, 14(1-2), 16-21. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/emr.v13i1-2.6387
Anglada-Tort, M., Thueringer, H., & Omigie, D. (2019): The busking experiment: A field study measuring behavioural responses to street music performances. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 29(1), 46-55. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pmu0000236
Anglada-Tort, M., & Sanfilippo, K.R.M. (2019): Visualizing music psychology: A bibliometric analysis of Psychology of Music, Music Perception, and Musicae Scientiae from 1973 to 2017”, Music & Science, 2, 2059204318811786. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204318811786
Anglada-Tort, M. (2018): Commentary on Canonne (2018): Listening to improvisation. Empirical Musicology Review. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/emr.v13i1-2.6387
2018
Anglada-Tort, M., Baker, T., & Müllensiefen, D. (2018): False memories in music listening: Exploring the misinformation effect and individual difference factors in auditory memory. Memory, 1-16. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2018.1545858
2017
Anglada-Tort, M., & Müllensiefen, D. (2017): The repeated recording illusion: The effects of extrinsic and individual difference factors on musical judgments. Music Perception, 35(1), 94-117. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2017.35.1.94
Ferré., P., Anglada-Tort, M., Guasch, M. (2017): “Processing of emotional words in bilinguals: Testing the effects of Word concreteness, task type and language status”, Second Language Research, 1- 24. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658317744008
My research interests broadly relate to the psychology of music, auditory perception, empirical aesthetics, production and consumption of creative work, cultural evolution, collective cognition, popularity dynamics, and cross-cultural research. I am interested in supervising MPhil and PhD research projects that use psychological and/or computational methods to study topics related to any of these general interests. Currently, I am particularly interested in the following research areas, for which I am especially keen to supervise students:
1. Studying human cognition through large-scale online experiments
My research combines large-scale online data collection techniques with innovative psychological experiments to study music cognition and aesthetic behaviour. For example, I develop new methods to enable online experiments in complex production domains, such as high-precision tasks where participants’ productions (e.g., singing, tapping) are recorded through the web browser. I am particularly interested in using singing and other production modalities to study music cognition and evolution.
2. Cultural Evolution and Collective Cognition
Complex cultural traits such as language and music do not result only from individual brains, but also from being embedded in larger cultural processes consisting of multiple social interactions. To study how cultural transmission shapes the evolution of music and aesthetic products, I run transmission chain experiments in sophisticated production modalities, such has singing and tapping. This paradigm is like the ‘Telephone Game’: artistic creations (e.g., rhythms, songs) are passed from one participant to the next by singing or tapping. Over iterations, participants’ reproduction errors are amplified, allowing us to systematically study how ow cultural transmission shape the evolution of cultural traits. I also use methods from data science and computational sociology to study cultural processes taking place in the real-world. For example, I analyse music consumption data at a large scale (e.g., from Spotify or YouTube) to study the impact of globalization on cultural markets around the world.
3. Empirical Aesthetics, Social Norms, and Popularity Dynamics
How do we experience beauty? What are the main principles underlying popularity and fashion? I am interested in both the cognitive and cultural foundations of sensory valuation and aesthetic experience, in particular of complex and abstract stimuli such as music and art. I am also interested in studying popularity dynamics and the emergence of social norms in the context of aesthetics and fashion. One way in which I study such complex social phenomena is by simulating artificial cultural markets in the lab, for example by exploring dynamic patterns of interactions between thousands of participants when consuming creative work within evolving markets.
4. Sonic Testing and Audio Branding
I am interested in applying insights from social and music psychology to industry-related projects on music advertising and audio branding. I worked as a research consultant in several audio branding projects to test and identify optimal sonic strategies to increase brand awareness and consumer engagement, including Amazon, Aldi UK, SONOS, and Cadbury. I combine large-scale behavioural experiments with psychological paradigms to systematically explore how music and other auditory cues can convey brand values and improve consumers’ interactions with products and services.
