Leigh VanHandel
Associate Professor of Music Theory
Music
Faculty of Arts
Research Themes: The Communicating Mind and Body
Dr. Leigh VanHandel is an Associate Professor of Music Theory at UBC.
Dr. VanHandel's primary research areas are music theory pedagogy, music cognition, the relationship between music and language, computer-assisted research, and how those things all relate to one another. Her scholarship seeks to understand how music works and how humans process music; this allows her to help others learn about music, which she finds to be the most exciting aspect of the work she does.
Her lab group, the UBC VanLab, is an interdisciplinary group of undergraduates and graduate students interested in music cognition and music research. Current research projects include the Tempo Project, which is an investigation into how we perceive and process tempo, and what musical cues have an effect on our perception of tempo in music, as well as a project studying whether native language affects how we perceive complexity in rhythmic patterns.
