The Strand: What year are you and what are your majors?
Naomi: I’m going into third year, and my major is psychology.
What is your research?
There’s something that’s been studied for a long time with a probe tone method that’s pretty well known—people widely agree on certain sounds to fit with a musical tonality. People agree that it fits when they rate it on a scale of one to seven when they read it on scale and fit degrees. But what’s different about our experiment is using reaction time to see if the degree of fit changes how we process it and facilitate it. One thing we’re looking for is do we react faster to fit and not fit. It would have significant implications for processing degrees of fitting.
Why is this an important thing to research and how can this information be used in the future?
It’s important for the field of music cognition, which has some applications outside of music. Things like tone when people speak, that is related to music cognition in terms of musical fit. It also relates to perception, sensation, and stuff like that. And why humans understand music to be music. It’s a part of the brain that’s not that well understood, which is why music cognition is such a small field. Nobody’s ever really looked at reaction time and the probe tone method.
How did you get this position?
I applied to a work-study. I work at a lab called the Music Cognition Lab at UofT Scarborough in Dr. Mark Schmuckler’s lab. For one of the experiments I was helping a PhD student and another one was my professor’s experiment.
What advice do you have for students looking to do research?
I think apply to a lot of places. It’s so competitive, especially in psychology, which is a really oversaturated
field. I think also apply to things that you don’t think you’d get. If it’s a good job, a lot of those cons are worth it. In the grand scheme of things, it was definitely worth it. Apply to places you think you might not want; be open minded to things that might deter you. I emailed everybody I applied to and actually got lots of interviews, so don’t be afraid to be annoying, actually reach out directly.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
