Edward Large

Music is among the most powerful examples of how brain, body, and environment can enter into dynamic resonance. Recent advances in neuroscience reveal that neural oscillations synchronize with musical rhythms and tonal structures across multiple timescales—from slow cortical delta and theta rhythms that entrain to musical beat and pulse, to fast auditory and brainstem oscillations that encode pitch and harmony. In this talk, I present Neural Resonance Theory (NRT), a unifying framework that explains how such synchronization gives rise to perception, action, and emotion in music. Drawing on canonical models of nonlinear dynamics, NRT describes how physical principles—resonance, stability, attunement, and strong anticipation—govern the emergence of musical experience as an embodied neurodynamic process. Stable patterns of neural resonance correspond to perceptual and cultural universals in rhythm, tonality, and affect, while attunement through Hebbian plasticity accounts for learning, enculturation, and expertise. This dynamical approach reinterprets music cognition not as a process of symbolic prediction, but as a manifestation of lawful brain–body–environment coupling—illustrating how consciousness itself may arise from the resonant dynamics of living systems.

Dr. Edward Large is a leading figure in the neuroscience and psychology of music, known for pioneering research on how musical rhythm entrains brain dynamics. A Professor of Psychological Sciences and Physics at the University of Connecticut, he directs the Music Dynamics and Theoretical Neuroscience Laboratories and leads the Ecological Psychology program. His work with Mari Reiss Jones on Dynamic Attending Theory and his development of Neural Resonance Theory have reshaped understanding of how the brain and body synchronize with music. Author of over 100 scientific papers in journals such as Nature, Journal of Neuroscience, and Psychological Review, Dr. Large has received major honors including an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Visiting Chair at McGill University. He has served as President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and recently received the Music Has Power award from the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function. He is also co-founder of Oscillo Bioscience, a neurotechnology company developing music-based digital therapeutics for brain health and Alzheimer’s disease.