Sound Waves and Brain Waves – Communicating Through Music

Sound Waves and Brain Waves – Communicating Through Music
Monday, December 14 at 7:30pm

In this series we explore the intersections between jazz music and science, from how we experience sound and rhythm, to musical memories and the creative process. Join multiple Grammy nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow Miguel Zenón for an intimate online performance combined with conversation with scientists from Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, where Zenón is currently jazz artist-in-residence.

​Miguel Zenón​ represents a select group of musicians who have masterfully balanced and blended the often contradictory poles of innovation and tradition. Widely considered as one of the most groundbreaking and influential saxophonists of his generation,he has also developed a unique voice as a composer and as a conceptualist, concentrating his efforts on perfecting a fine mix between Latin American Folkloric Music and Jazz.

Daniel Kimmel, M.D., Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University where he studies the neural basis of abstraction and generalization in humans with Daphna Shohamy and Daniel Salzman. He completed his undergraduate degree at Oberlin College and Conservatory, where he double-majored in Biology and Neurobiology, while studying jazz guitar and flute. After two years as a computer developer in San Francisco, he continued his training in the M.D./Ph.D. program at Stanford University with Bill Newsome, where he recorded from single neurons in awake behaving monkeys to understand how prefrontal cortex represents and routes information about economic value to make decisions. He also was a founding member of the Stanford Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble. Dr. Kimmel completed his clinical residency in Psychiatry at Columbia, where he continued his research, developing new statistical tools for examining high-dimensional neural data with John Cunningham. He is now developing similar methods for multi-voxel fMRI of the human brain. Outside of research, Dr. Kimmel supervises residents in psychiatry and maintains a private practice in New York.