Representations in Music

Music is a perfect domain for studying cognitive representations due to its dominant role in our daily experiences. Whether you are trying to sing back a melody, decide if you like a new musical chord, or figure out if what you just heard was a song, your mind is applying complex processing to make sense of this rich sensory input. I am very interested in characterizing such processes and the cognitive representations that support them by leveraging large-scale adaptive experiments and computational models. Some of the projects that I work on in this domain include: (i) Psychoacoustic theories of consonance (Marjieh et al., 2024), (ii) Musical pitch representations (Marjieh et al., 2024), (iii) Rational accounts of the speech-to-song illusion (Marjieh et al., 2024), and (iv) Cultural evolution of sung melodies (Marjieh et al., 2025).

References

2025

Characterizing the Interaction of Cultural Evolution Mechanisms in Experimental Social Networks

Raja Marjieh, Manuel Anglada-Tort, Thomas L Griffiths, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2025

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{marjieh2025characterizing,
  title = {Characterizing the Interaction of Cultural Evolution Mechanisms in Experimental Social Networks},
  author = {Marjieh, Raja and Anglada-Tort, Manuel and Griffiths, Thomas L and Jacoby, Nori},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
  volume = {47},
  year = {2025},
}

2024

Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales

Raja Marjieh, Peter MC Harrison, Harin Lee, and 2 more authors

Nature Communications. Listen to the experiments here , 2024

Bib HTML

@article{marjieh2024timbral,
  title = {Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales},
  author = {Marjieh, Raja and Harrison, Peter MC and Lee, Harin and Deligiannaki, Fotini and Jacoby, Nori},
  journal = {Nature Communications},
  volume = {15},
  number = {1},
  pages = {1482},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {Nature Publishing Group UK London},
  url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45812-z},
}

Pitch is Not a Helix: Probing the Structure of Musical Pitch Across Tasks and Experience

Raja Marjieh, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Nori Jacoby

bioRxiv, 2024

Bib HTML

@article{marjieh2023pitch,
  author = {Marjieh, Raja and Griffiths, Thomas L. and Jacoby, Nori},
  title = {Pitch is Not a Helix: Probing the Structure of Musical Pitch Across Tasks and Experience},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory},
  journal = {bioRxiv},
}

A Rational Analysis of the Speech-to-Song Illusion

Raja Marjieh, Pol Rijn, Ilia Sucholutsky, and 3 more authors

In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2024

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{marjieh2024rational,
  title = {A Rational Analysis of the Speech-to-Song Illusion},
  author = {Marjieh, Raja and van Rijn, Pol and Sucholutsky, Ilia and Lee, Harin and Griffiths, Thomas L and Jacoby, Nori},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
  volume = {46},
  year = {2024},
}