Two Georgia Tech faculty in the School of Music, Claire Arthur and Alexandria Smith, have been awarded the prestigious Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Award for their project exploring how the brain represents imagined sound. Arthur, a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS), and Smith will study “musical imagery” — the experience of hearing music internally without external sound — using electroencephalography (EEG) to better understand how people recall and navigate musical structure.
Their project, The Music Within: Neural Markers of Imagined Sound and Memory, brings together cognitive science and musical improvisation to compare brain activity across listening, silence, and imagination. The work has the potential to inform new approaches in health, accessibility, and imagery-based therapies, particularly for individuals with limited ability to produce music physically.
Administered by the NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative, the award supports interdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection of science and the arts to better understand how aesthetic experiences shape brain function and wellbeing.