We are delighted to announce our student and ECR Keynote Awardees for the AMPS/APSCOM 2026 Conference! Our awardees will present in a special session on the Thursday afternoon of the conference.
The recipient of the 2026 ECR Keynote Award is Dr Gabriele Cecchetti, a Research Fellow in Music Science at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development. His research interests lie at the intersection of music theory, computational modelling, and cognitive (neuro)science to answer questions around the cognitive underpinnings of how we experience music: what kinds of structures can be hidden in music, and what cognitive processes make it possible for humans and machines to discover such structures while listening? Gabriele obtained a PhD at the Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab of the École Polytchnique Fédérale de Lausanne and an MPhil at the Centre for Music and Science of the University of Cambridge. In Rome, his hometown, he previously graduated in physics (Università ‘La Sapienza’) and as a cellist (Conservatorio ‘S. Cecilia’). Since 2021, he serves in the Scientific Committee of the Italian Society for Music Theory and Analysis as well as in the editorial boards of the journals Analitica and Music Perception.
The recipient of the 2026 Student Keynote Award is Zixuan Jia, a PhD candidate in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, with a particular interest in the relationship between music and language. Prior to her PhD, she completed an MSc in Phonetics at the University of Edinburgh and assisted in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience research at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her doctoral research draws on large-scale cross-cultural data, combining acoustic analysis and behavioural measures to investigate how music and speech differ in their acoustic properties and social functions. With an interdisciplinary background in phonetics and psychology, Zixuan’s long-term goal is to develop a comprehensive framework for understanding the music-language interface across structural, acoustic, and cognitive levels.
