Music Professor Wins National Award for Book on Music and the Mind

Russell Cothren

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers honored University of Arkansas music professor, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, for her book, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.

Margulis is director of the University of Arkansas Music Cognition Lab as well as a professor in the Department of Music. In On Repeat, Margulis studied the psychology of repetition in music on the mind, across time, style and cultures.

The book is the first in-depth study of repetitiveness in music. She looks at repetition throughout a composition, the compulsion to repeatedly listen to a particular song and the phenomenon of the earworm, where a song plays on repeat in your brain.

Music, Margulis notes, "is a fundamentally human capcity, present in all known cultures, and important to intellectual, emotional and social experience."

The ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson award is given annually for excellence in books about music. It will be presented during a ceremony Nov. 17 in Manhattan. This is the second national award Margulis has received for On Repeat. Last year she received the Wallace Berry Award, the Society for Music Theory's distinguished book award.

The ASCAP Foundation, founded in 1975, is dedicated to supporting American music creators and encouraging development through music education and talent development programs.

On Repeat was released by Oxford University Press in 2013. Her website links to articles and audio files of interviews about the book and her research.