Petr Janata

Petr Janata is a Professor in the Psychology Department and Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, USA. He received his B.A. from Reed College and his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. After investigating song perception and song learning in songbirds as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, he went to Dartmouth College and incorporated functional neuroimaging methods into his music perception research. His research on how the human brain engages with music has examined expectation, imagery, sensorimotor coupling, memory, and emotion in relation to tonality, rhythm, and timbre. His work also emphasizes the use of models of musical structure to analyze behavioral and brain data. He has pioneered psychological and brain research examining musical situations that elicit strong emotional experiences, such as music-evoked remembering or the state of, “being in the groove.” He is the recipient of two Fulbright research fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Templeton Advanced Research Program award from the Metanexus Institute, and grant funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the GRAMMY Foundation.