People

Dr. Sandra Trehub, Music Development Lab Director (publications) 

The principal focus of my research is on the development of listening skills in infants and young children. At the simplest level, this involves their ability to detect a wide variety of sounds in quiet and in noisy backgrounds. At a more complex level, this involves documenting infants' and young childrens' skill in discriminating and remembering realistic sound patterns such as melodies. In addition to the research on auditory perception, I conduct other research on singing to infants in the course of care-giving, an activity that seems to be universal. This research has a field component as well as a laboratory component, the field work involving the collection of samples of singing from various national and ethnic groups locally and abroad. One goal of this work is to document the similarities and differences in the nature of singing to infants across different languages and cultures. Another is to determine the effect of such singing on infant listeners.




Judy Plantinga, Post Doctoral Fellow

My research is focused on understanding the music-listening skills of infants and how experience shapes those skills. In particular, I am interested in the development of pitch perception and its relation to the development of music and language abilities. My graduate work looked at memory for music and whether infants encoded absolute or relative pitch in long term memory. My postdoctoral work has focused on the perception of consonance and dissonance.




Beste Kalender, Ph.D. Student

beste.kalendar@utoronto.ca

Beste Kalender is a graduate student in Developmental Psychology at UofT Mississauga. She is interested in music perception and cognition in addition to the development of singing and movement practices. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Psychology at Bogazici University, Turkey. Having received several years of training in opera singing at Istanbul State Conservatory, she has a good understanding of Western Classical Music and the development of singing. She has also received individual training on “music and movement techniques to support children development’’. She has given a number of music therapy concerts for children and has spent two years of effort teaching music to autistic children. Beste’s interest in music and child development encouraged her to pursue her passion in research on the Psychology of Music

Mathieu R. Saindon, Ph.D. Student

mr.saindon@utoronto.ca

Mathieu is a Ph.D. student in Psychology in the Auditory Development Lab and the Music Cognition Lab. His research focuses on language development, more specifically on how children use pitch to understand speech, and how this changes over time. Other research interests include the study of music perception in individuals who use a cochlear implant. Prior to his graduate studies, Mathieu obtained Bachelors' degrees in Music (Piano Performance, Composition) and Psychology from the University of Ottawa. Prior to beginning his university studies, Mathieu completed his Performer's Associateship with the Royal Conservatory of Toronto (ARCT) in piano.

Michael  Weiss, Ph.D. Student

michael.weiss@utoronto.ca

I'm a first year Ph.D co-advised by Glenn Schellenberg and Sandra Trehub. My broad interests are audition and cognition, especially from developmental and evolutionary perspectives. My current research examines how timbre affects memory for musical memories, more specifically if the voice--a biologically relevant signal--imparts a special advantage relative to musical instruments, and whether listeners at different ages are more or less influenced by the timbre of the melody. I studied at the University of Arizona previous to this program, I love to travel, and I'm a musician and amateur recording enthusiast.

Lisa Hotson, Research Assistant

Former Lab Members

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Graduate Students