CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Harvard Music Lab Summer Internship 2021
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 research assistants in psychology to spend their summer with us! We will also consider students from related fields (e.g., music, linguistics, computer science, evolutionary biology, anthropology).
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. (If circumstances permit:) 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 7 June to 13 August 2021 and is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Interns will work 40 hours per week. Depending on the circumstances, the internship may be fully virtual, where interns may work from any time zone. 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 $2,200 stipend (pre-tax). Depending on performance and contribution levels, co-authorship on papers is also a possibility.
Visit
https://tinyurl.com/musiclabsummer to apply. We will review applications beginning on 1 March 2021. If you have any questions, please contact us at
musiclab+summer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
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Lab Manager
The Music Lab, The Pinker Lab
Harvard University
Department of Psychology
themusiclab.org
(617) 998-1769