Paolo Ammirante is a post-doctoral fellow at the SMART lab. He completed his Master’s degree in music performance at the University of Toronto and his PhD in psychology with Bill Thompson at Macquarie University. His dissertation investigated the influence of pitch on timing and motor skill. His research interests include synchronization (at behavioural and neural levels), vibrotactile perception of sound, and melodic universals.

List of publications:

Book chapters

Ammirante, P. (in press). Timing [encyclopedia entry]. In Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Braun Janzen, T., Ammirante, P., & Thompson, W. F. (in press). Development of timing skills. In G. McPherson (Ed.), Musical Prodigies: Interpetations from Psychology, Musicology and Ethnomusicology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Quinto, L., Ammirante, P., & Connors, M. H., & Thompson, W. F. (in press). Prodigies and music composition: Cognitive skills and developmental antecedents. In G. McPherson (Ed.), Musical Prodigies: Interpetations from Psychology, Musicology and Ethnomusicology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Thompson, W. F., & Ammirante, P. (2012). Musical thought. In K. J. Holyoak & R. G. Morrison (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (pp. 684-698). New York: Oxford University Press.

Book reviews

Ammirante, P. (2013). Review of Mark Changizi’s Harnessed. Canadian Acoustics, 41(1).

Papers

Ammirante, P., & Russo, F. A. (in press). Low-skip bias: The distribution of skips and leaps across

the pitch ranges of vocal and instrumental melodies is vocally constrained. Music Perception.

Ammirante, P., Russo, F. A., Good, A., & Fels, D. (2013). Feeling voices. PLoS ONE 8(1), e53585.

Russo, F. A., Ammirante, P., & Fels, D. (2012). Vibrotactile discrimination of musical timbre. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(4), 822-826.

Ammirante, P. & Thompson, W. F. (2012). Continuation tapping to triggered melodies: Motor resonance effects of melodic motion. Experimental Brain Research, 64(2), 381-393.

Ammirante, P., Thompson, W. F., & Russo, F. A. (2011). Ideomotor effects of pitch on continuation tapping. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(2), 381-393. [pdf]

Ammirante, P. & Thompson, W. F. (2010). Melodic accent as an emergent property of tonal motion. Empirical Musicology Review, 5(3), 94-107.