Imaginative Minds: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

30 April-1 May 2004

The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Ian Cross

Prior to becoming involved in research in music cognition, Ian Cross was for some years a professional classical guitarist. His undergraduate and doctoral studies were at City University, London. In 1986 he came to the Faculty of Music at Cambridge where he is now Reader and Director of the Centre for Music and Science, and a Fellow of Wolfson College. He also leads the Science and Music group in the Faculty of Music. He has published two co-edited books, Musical Structure and Cognition (1985) and Representing Musical Structure (1991), both co-edited with P. Howell and R. West, and numerous articles and book chapters on cognitive and scientific aspects of music. His research interests embrace a wide range of subjects centred on scientific approaches to music; these include investigation of music as interaction, exploration of the constraints of embodiment on musical experience, the cognition of music in multi-media contexts, the dynamics and organisation of musical memory, the formalisation of structure in music cognition, the development of computational approaches to real-time musical interaction in cognition, and the evolutionary roots of musicality. At present, his principal research focus is on the exploration of music as a biocultural phenomenon, involving collaboration with archaeologists, psychologists and engineers.