Keynote | Psyche Loui: Scales for Predictions, Creativity, and Music-Based Interventions

Music unites listeners through shared predictions and reward. At the heart of this process is the musical scale—a designed object that quantizes pitch into structures capable of generating and fulfilling expectation. A survey of the world’s scales reveals five core design features and a single overarching dimension of enculturation, ranging from deeply familiar tonal systems to entirely novel sonic environments. The Bohlen-Pierce (BP) scale occupies a unique position in this multidimensional space: combining a non-octave equivalence interval with near-zero enculturation, it sits at the intersection where the need for rigorous enculturation research is most acute. Harnessing the capacity of the BP scale to generate genuinely new predictions, this talk presents behavioral and neuroscience findings from the MIND Laboratory examining how children and adults across different countries acquire musical structure from an unfamiliar system. Results illuminate the developmental trajectory of statistical learning, the neural signatures of prediction error, and the timescales over which aesthetic preferences emerge from exposure. Beyond perception, the BP scale serves as a test bed for studying creative cognition, enabling novel assessments of musical improvisation and imagination. The talk closes by connecting these findings to clinical applications, considering how principles of enculturation and prediction inform optimal dosage design for music-based interventions targeting cognition and brain health.  

Psyche Loui

Psyche Loui is Associate Professor of Music and Psychology at Northeastern University, where she directs the MIND (Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics) Lab and serves as Associate Dean of Research in the College of Arts, Media and Design and Associate Director of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Health. She brings a unique perspective to music research as both a neuroscientist and performing violinist, bridging experimental rigor with artistic practice. Loui’s research explores how the brain learns, processes, and creates music, with particular emphasis on using artificial musical systems as controlled laboratories for understanding neural mechanisms. Her pioneering work with the Bohlen-Pierce scale—a microtonal system based on the tritave rather than the octave—demonstrates how novel tuning systems can reveal fundamental principles of musical learning, prediction, and pleasure. By creating controlled compositional experiments that exist outside of Western tonal traditions, she illuminates how brains adapt to unfamiliar sonic worlds and what this reveals about music cognition more broadly. Loui directs the MIND Lab (Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics laboratory) which combines cutting-edge neuroscience methods (fMRI, EEG, diffusion tensor imaging) with computational approaches including machine learning and natural language processing to decode musical experience. Recent work investigates how people generate mental imagery in response to music, revealing that seemingly idiosyncratic imaginings are often broadly shared across listeners. She has developed novel computational tools to analyze free-response descriptions of music listening, enabling robust empirical study of subjective experiences previously considered intractable. Loui’s research extends from fundamental discovery to clinical translation. Her work on gamma-enhanced music interventions for Alzheimer’s disease leverages technological advances in sound synthesis to create therapeutic applications, supported by multiple NIH grants. She has secured over $6 million in external funding, including an NSF CAREER award for her work on artificial musical systems.

Loui plays violin in Boston’s Longwood Symphony Orchestra, advises the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, and plays banjo and mandolin in a chamber music/indie rock ensemble. She is also author of the forthcoming book Strange Scales: How Novel Music Reveals the Secrets of the Predictive Brain (MIT Press) and co-editor of Science-Music Borderlands (MIT Press, 2023), which won the Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society. Her work has appeared in leading journals including Psychological Science, Journal of Neuroscience, NeuroImage, and Cognition, and has been featured in The New Yorker, New York Times, BBC, and NPR.

Loui serves as President-Elect of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition and Associate Editor of Cognition. She holds a PhD in Psychology from UC Berkeley and dual bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Music from Duke University.

More about Psyche Loui here.