CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Harvard Music Lab Summer Internship 2019
At the Music Lab, we study the basic science of music in an effort to understand how and why humans produce and perceive music at all ages and across all cultures. We are recruiting undergraduate research assistants in the fields of cognitive science, psychology, evolutionary biology, music theory, ethnomusicology, anthropology, linguistics, and computer science to spend their summer with us!
Summer interns will be working on studies investigating the impact of music on infant affect and behavior, universals and cross-cultural variation in music perception and music production, people's use of music in daily life, and long-term effects of the use of music in the home on parent and infant health. Prospective interns are encouraged to read our papers at themusiclab.org before applying.
As an intern, you will have the opportunity to work on both ongoing and new studies from design to manuscript stage. Here's a non-exhaustive list of example projects we'll be working on this summer:
1. In-lab studies exploring the degree to which music can function as a tool for parents to use when their infants are upset.
2. Crowd-sourced online studies about music categorization and perception using both traditional study pools of online workers and "citizen science" approaches.
3. Mobile app-based data collection from parents of infants and young children concerning infant/child temperament, parenting behaviors, and their relations to one another.
4. Studies examining the possibility of links between synchronous activity (music or otherwise) and cooperation, prosociality, and interpersonal affinity.
5. Expanding our diverse collection of audio recordings for the Natural History of Song Project and conducting phylogenetic analyses of the corpus.
6. Interns are encouraged to propose their own independent projects building on current research at The Music Lab, especially if these projects are amenable to online data collection.
The internship is 10 weeks long, from 10 June to 16 August 2019 and is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Interns will work 40 hours per week. Some evening and weekend work may be required. All applicants are encouraged to apply for funding from their home university; we will support such applications and for exceptional students, we may supplement external funding with up to a $1,800 stipend. Depending on performance and contribution levels, co-authorship on papers is also a possibility.