Laurel Trainor PhD

Dr. Laurel Trainor is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour at McMaster University, a Research Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Hospital, Toronto, and the Director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind (MIMM). She has published over 100 research articles on the neuroscience of auditory development and the perception of music in journals including Science, Nature, Journal of Neuroscience, Signal Processing, Cognition, Music Perception, and Developmental Science. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and an Innovator of Distinction. She holds major grants from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Science Research Council of Canada, and the Grammy Foundation. Laurel is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and maintains a high media profile. She has pioneered the study of musical development, showing that infants acquire the music system of their culture without instruction, just as they acquire language. Her work on rhythm perception shows that listening to a beat activates motor networks in the brain even in the absence of movement and that this multisensory interaction is reflected in oscillatory networks that can be measured with EEG and MEG.

Her studies show further that synchronous movement to a musical beat increases prosocial behavior even in infants. Laurel is also engaged in research using objective measures to study a wide range of auditory perceptual abilities under amplification by different hearing aid algorithms. Laurel is the founding director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, a multidisciplinary group of researchers whose mandate is to promote the scientific study of music, to promote music education, and to engage the community. This group has recently received a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and partners and is building a cutting-edge laboratory/concert hall (LIVE Performance Lab) to study issues in music performance and performer-audience interactions in normal-hearing individuals and those with hearing impairments. Laurel also has a Bachelor of Music Performance from the University of Toronto, likes playing chamber music, and is currently the principal flute of Symphony Hamilton.