Iballa Burunat

I have an interdisciplinary background in systematic musicology and recently finished my Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Brain integrative function driven by musical training during real-world music listening", completed in January 2017 at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. I study the brain processes underlying naturalistic auditory stimulation——thereby increasing the validity of the findings——and how they are modulated by listeners' musical training by using a variety of methodological approaches. In particular, I am interested in how musical expertise impacts auditory and motor brain networks. My research contributes to understanding the brain-music interaction during real-life music listening, which could be useful for the developing field of music information retrieval and, ultimately, for music-based therapeutic interventions. At present, I work in the project Dynamics of Music Cognition led by professor Petri Toiviainen at the Finnish Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research (CIMR) in Jyväskylä, Finland.