SCHOLARSHIP
After graduating from the University of Exeter in 1982 with a BSc in Theoretical Physics, Neil landed a job in the Department of Psychology at the same university, as a Research Assistant working with Dr Henry Shaffer. The area of the research was the psychology of music, and specifically expression in piano performance.
In 1985, whilst studying part-time for a PhD, Neil’s first academic paper about expressive timing was published in the journal, Music Perception (Todd 1985). This paper has remained a hit in academic circles and currently has over 400 citations. The work also formed the basis of Neil’s PhD thesis which was submitted in 1989. An important theme in this early work was the link between musical rhythm and movement and Neil became fascinated by the way in which human listeners perceive movement in music.
After a stint as a post-doc at City and Sheffield University Music Departments, in 1994 Neil was appointed as a Lecturer at the University of Manchester in the Department of Psychology. Here, he was able to pursue the music/movement theme in more depth. He became convinced that the human body plays an absolutely central role on how we hear rhythm, and that the vestibular or balance system was a core part of this mechanism (Todd 1994, 1999; Todd et al 1999; Todd et al 2002).
It was during this period in Manchester that Neil also took up a new method of vestibular evoked potentials produced by sound, to investigate the role of the vestibular system in the perception of sound and music. In a series of papers, Neil provided evidence for the first time of a link between loud dance music and the vestibular system – the “Rock ‘n roll threshold”! (Todd 2000, 2001).
A sabbatical visit in 2002 to work with Professor James Colebatch in Sydney, Australia kicked off a productive collaboration, wherein a series of papers provided a wealth of evidence of vestibular sensitivity to low-frequency sound and vibration (Todd et al 2007). So effectively can the vestibular system be activated by sound and vibration that it is now used in audiology departments around the world as a routine clinical test (Todd 2013). Neil’s time in Australia also saw him develop an interest in the evolutionary biology of hearing and balance (Todd 2004, 2007).
Following a two year period in Australia, Neil moved in 2005 to the Neuroscience division in the Faculty of Life Science at Manchester, where he remained until taking voluntary severance in 2013. Although now no longer employed at Manchester, Neil has retained an honorary/visiting status. This second Manchester period, with much of the work supported by the Wellcome Trust, witnessed a further productive development of the field of vestibular evoked potentials and, in particular, advances in underlying neuroanatomical and physiological mechanisms (Todd et al 2014).
Since becoming freelance Neil has been able to devote much time and thought to consider how his prior 30 years of work fits together with the huge amount of new scientific literature in the field of the psychology of music, that has emerged since the development of neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI.
Neil reflects that when he first suggested that the vestibular system plays a central role in perception of sound and music, it was considered to be a bit crazy.
Now, he is delighted to note that the idea is no longer questioned. Neil recently published two major review papers for both the professional scientific (in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Todd and Lee 2015)) and for the lay reader (in American Scientist (Todd 2015)). As a freelance consultant, Neil continues his collaborative scientific work related to hearing, sound, music and movement.
Published Works
Todd NPM. (1985). A model of expressive timing in tonal music. Music Perception 3, 33-58.
Todd NPM. (1994). The auditory primal sketch: A multi-scale model of rhythmic grouping. Journal of New Music Research 23, 25-70.
Todd NPM. (1995). The kinematics of musical expression. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97, 1940-1949.
Todd NPM, Lee CS, O’Boyle DJ. (1999). A sensory-motor theory of rhythm, time perception and beat induction. Journal of New Music Research 28, 5-29.
Todd, N.P.M (1999) Motion in Music: A neurobiological perspective. Music Perception. 17(1), 115-126.
Todd NPM, Cody F. (2000). Vestibular responses to loud dance music: A physiological basis for the “rock and roll threshold”? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 107, 496-500.
Todd NPM, O’Boyle DJ, Lee CS. (2002). A sensory-motor theory of beat induction. Psychological Research 66, 26-39.
Todd, N.P.M and Merker, B. (2004) Siamangs exceed the saccular threshold: Intensity of the song of Hylobates syndactylus. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 115(6), 3077 – 3080.
Todd, NPM, Aw, S., Rosengren, SM.and Colebatch JC (2007) Ocular vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (OVEMPS) produced by air (AC) and bone-conducted (BC) sound. Clinical Neurophysiology 118, 381-390.
Todd, NPM (2007) Estimated source intensity and active space of the American alligator vocal display. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 122, 2906-2915.
Todd NPM. (2013). The ocular vestibular evoked myogenic potential (OVEMP), ten years old. Clin Neurophysiol 125 (3), 439-441
Todd NPM, Paillard A, Kluk K and Colebatch J (2014) Vestibular receptors contribute to auditory evoked potentials. Hearing Research 309, 63-74.
Todd NPM, Lee CS. (2015). The sensory-motor theory of beat induction 20 years on: A new synthesis. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9, 444.
Todd NPM. (2015). Do humans possess a second sense of hearing? American Scientist 103, 348-355.
