Samuel Mehr

Samuel Mehr joined the faculty of the Yale Child Study Center in 2023. He splits his time between New Haven and New Zealand, where he is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Auckland. He directs The Music Lab, an international research group focusing on the psychology of music. Mehr’s research draws on ideas and tools from cognitive and developmental psychology, data science, and evolutionary anthropology, to ask what music is, how music works, and why music exists.

The Music Lab was established in 2017 at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, with funding from the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and the Harvard Data Science Initiative. In addition to more traditional experimental work, we specialise in large-scale citizen science experiments. You can participate at https://themusiclab.org.