By Scott Leimroth, PhD Candidate, University of Wollongong
If you’ve ever tried to explain time-frequency analysis to a room full of musicologists, or tried to convince a psychophysiology lab group that the choice of musical stimulus actually matters beyond “it’s just a sound,” you’ll know the feeling I’m talking about.
Music psychology sits at an intersection, and intersections are messy places.
My path to a PhD in Psychophysiology has been anything but linear. I’ve been performing music since I was 18, and went on to study a Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Education at the University of New South Wales, starting in 1991, while continuing to perform music across Australia. After graduating I taught music in settings ranging from kindergartens to HSC classrooms and the prison system, all while still performing and running marketing for the family automotive business.
It wasn’t until much later that I came back to university, completing a Bachelor of Psychological Science at the University of Wollongong with a major in Social Marketing, followed by Honours in Psychological Science. Now I’m doing a PhD investigating how the brain and body respond to rhythmic changes in music. It’s been a long road from UNSW to here, but every part of it feeds into what I do now.
Two Languages, One Research Question
In my research, I’m investigating how listeners respond when an expected musical pattern is violated, specifically when a rhythmic change is introduced into a repeated musical sequence. To do this well, I need to care about the music as music (not just as “an auditory stimulus”), and I also need to care about the signal processing, the electrode placements, the artefact rejection, and the statistical models that let me make sense of what the EEG and peripheral physiology are actually telling me.
These are very different skill sets. It’s a bit like being a mechanic who also needs to be a painter. You need to understand the engine and appreciate the aesthetics, because when bridging two fields like music and psychophysiology, the two are inseparable. The way a piece of music is structured isn’t just an artistic choice; it directly shapes the neural and physiological response you’re trying to measure. And the way you process your physiological data isn’t just a technical step; it determines whether you can actually detect the musically meaningful signal buried in the noise.
The Practical Reality
In practice, this means a lot of translation work happens across the field. When talking to psychophysiology people, there’s often a need to explain why it matters that a musical stimulus has a specific rhythmic structure, why the point at which a change is introduced isn’t arbitrary, and why “just use any piece of music” isn’t an option. At music-focused events, the conversation flips: explaining what EEG actually measures, what skin conductance and heart rate variability can tell us about the autonomic nervous system’s response, and why these physiological signals can reveal things that self-report measures can’t.
Neither conversation is frustrating. Both are interesting. But the gap is real, and I think it’s one of the things that makes music psychophysiology both challenging and exciting as a field. Having spent years in the music world and now in the psychology and physiology world, I can see how much each side has to offer the other, and how much gets lost when they don’t talk.
Why This Matters for AMPS
I think this interdisciplinary gap is something our community is uniquely positioned to address. AMPS brings together people from music, psychology, neuroscience, education, and beyond. The AMPS/APSCOM 2026 conference is a perfect example: it’s a space where these different perspectives can collide productively.
If you’re a music researcher curious about physiological methods, or a psychophysiology researcher wondering how to design more musically meaningful experiments, I’d encourage you to reach out across that divide. The AMPS community is full of people who’ve been navigating this intersection for years, and one of the best things about being part of this society is that you don’t have to figure it out alone.
For students and early career researchers especially, my honest advice is: don’t be afraid of the parts of your research that feel unfamiliar. The discomfort of learning a new discipline’s language is temporary. The richness of being able to think across both is permanent.
Scott Leimroth is a PhD candidate in Psychophysiology at the University of Wollongong and a student member of the AMPS Committee. He holds a B.Mus/B.Ed from UNSW and a B.Psych.Sci (Hons) from UOW. His research uses EEG, electrodermal, and cardiac measures to investigate how listeners respond to rhythmic changes in music.