Connecting Music and Language

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Margot Schneider ('26), a student in the College of Arts and Sciences, conducted research with Dr. Jianjing Kuang (Linguistics Department) in the Penn Phonetics Lab through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program (PURM).

I was drawn to Dr. Kuang's work and this project because of my strong interest in music and how the brain comprehends it. In addition to being a musician and a cognitive science major, I had done a lot of independent reading about this topic. From my freshman year psychology and biology classes, I discovered how interesting it is to learn about the steps of processing sound and the intricacies of how music can produce emotion and nuance of language, both in one's native language and in foreign languages. I wanted to better grasp these topics through formal research and investigation. These topics and questions are particularly important to me because music and language are such universal entities, but still can vary so much. Almost everyone speaks a language, has a favorite song, and can subconsciously detect and process tone and emotion, yet it's so natural that almost nobody thinks about these things consciously.

Through my PURM experience, I learned a lot about technical phonetics, like what is a sound wave, what is the phonetic alphabet, and what are the details of spoken language that help us understand it. However, what I also learned about (and what I found to be challenging) was the actual process of doing research. Because my research partner and I were primarily interested in understanding phonetic cognition in children, this involved reaching out to local camps and summer programs to see if they would be willing to let our lab run experiments with their groups of kids. This was very challenging. I had to learn how to "market" my own work to make it sound appealing to the camp administrators and also mutually beneficial. I would be collecting valuable data, but the kids would also be taught an interesting lesson that could help them better understand their spoken world. The process of getting all the appropriate clearances, navigating consent forms, and scheduling were the most difficult parts of this project.

Though there were some bumps along the way, the connections I formed with my mentor and my research partner were rewarding and valuable. My partner (James Huang) and I brought a very different approach and skillset to this project, and I found that we complemented each other nicely. I did the bulk of the background research and the "marketing" of our project, and he brought strong coding/computer science skills that supplied some of the "game" formats in which we presented our experiments. Dr. Kuang was amazing. She was a fantastic educator and supporter of our interests and encouraged us to take control of what we wanted to learn and investigate. - Margot Schneider 

Check out this video to hear James Huang's perspective on this research experience!

Interested in reading more first-hand accounts about undergraduate research? Check out the other experiences featured on our Student News Page and Social Media!

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