Abstract
Collective music making showcases the remarkable human capacity for precise yet flexible interpersonal coordination. I will present the results of studies investigating the behavioural and brain bases of this ability using controlled laboratory paradigms and naturalistic musical tasks, as well as related computational modelling, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation approaches. Findings are informative about links between basic sensory-motor mechanisms that enable co-performers to anticipate and adapt to each other’s actions, aspects of personality including empathy, and social-cognitive processes that regulate the balance between psychological representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’. 

About the speaker
Peter Keller holds degrees in Music and Psychology from the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is Professor of Neuroscience in the Center for Music in the Brain and the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University, with a joint appointment in the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University. Previously, he led a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig, Germany), held a European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and served as Editor of the interdisciplinary journal ‘Empirical Musicology Review.’ His research addresses the psychological and neurophysiological underpinnings of human interaction in musical contexts.