What People Do with Music and What Music Does to People

Marc Leman is professor musicology at Ghent University. He specialises in theory and methodology of human interaction with music. Or in other words: he investigates what people do with music and, more importantly, what music does to people.

Leman is considered a pioneer in computational and embodied musicology. In recent years, his focus is on the statistical analysis of high-dimensional data related to music. He founded the Art and Science Lab at the Ghent innovation centre De Krook, which is considered a European top lab for the study of human interaction in virtual reality settings due to its high-performance 3D audio and motion caption recordings facilities.

The professor has published over 450 article and books (at MIT Press, amongst others). In 2015, he received the Ernest-John Solvay Prize for Language, Culture and Social Sciences from the research foundation FWO and was holder of the Francqui Chair at the Université de Mons in 2014. Leman was also laureate of the Methusalem programme (KU Leuven) from 2007 to 2023.