Andrea Schiavio

Andrea received his PhD in Music from the University of Sheffield (2014), studying musical skill acquisition and development through the lens of embodied cognitive science. After his doctoral studies, he continued this research as postdoctoral fellow in the USA (School of Music, Ohio State University), Turkey (Department of Psychology, Bosphorus University), and Austria (Institute for Music Education, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz) gaining relevant interdisciplinary experience. From 2017 to 2022, he was based at the Centre of Systematic Musicology of the University of Graz, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Andrea is President of ESCOM (the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music), and one of three founders and Editors of the newly established book series Music as Art and Science (OUP). In addition to a recently published co-authored monograph for MIT Press (Musical bodies, musical minds. Enactive cognitive science and the meaning of human musicality), his work appears in venues such as Music Perception, Scientific Reports, Psychology of Music, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Research in Music Education, and The Oxford Handbook of Musical Performance, among others. He joined the University of York in 2022 as a Lecturer in Music Education.

1. Research Interests​

My professional interests lie in: (i) the role of action and interaction in musical experience, (ii) the psychology of musical creativity, (iii) the acquisition and development of musical skills, (iv) the links between perception, emotion, culture, and music cognition, (v) the philosophical foundations of music psychology and education, and (vi) the collaboration of science and humanities in music research.

2. 4E Music Cognition​

In my writings I defend a '4E' approach - one that conceives of the musical mind as Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive. While this framework is increasingly receiving attention in the cognitive sciences, it remains rather unexplored in music. My aim is to fill this gap and provide richer understandings of music cognition and its creative manifestations.

3. Collaborative Work​

Most of my research is done in collaboration with colleagues working in music and other disciplines. I am extremely grateful to all of them, and to all the other scholars whose work inspired me throughout the years. Building on such complementary expertise, I aim to establish novel connections between music, the cognitive humanities, and the social and empirical sciences.