Psyche Loui is a research scientist studying music and the brain. She received her B.S. from Duke University with double majors in psychology and music. While at Duke she was concertmaster and violin soloist of the Duke Symphony Orchestra. Her interest in combining music and psychology led to graduate school in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, where she specialized in music perception and cognition. Her research was conducted jointly at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, Auditory Perception Laboratory, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.

Dr. Loui’s thesis addresses the question of whether music is innate or learned. Using a novel musical system known as the Bohlen-Pierce scale, Loui showed that people could learn new musical grammars within a half-hour of exposure; furthermore, brain potentials elicited by the novel musical structures resemble brain responses to Western music.

Her current research, conducted in the Harvard Medical School, mainly investigates the neural substrates of tone-deafness. Using behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, her present research aims to identify structures and functions of the human brain that predict musical ability, and communication skills in the world of sound more generally.