Noah Fram

Background

About Noah Fram

I am a cognitive neuroscientist and music composer currently based in Nashville, TN. My work centers on the communicative nature of music, and how that communicative nature manifests in neurodevelopmental disorders impacting social communication, such as autism. As a researcher, I marry computational modeling techniques with functional neuroimaging and psychophysics approaches to identify and understand cognitive mechanisms in autism. To do this, I use music as a naturalistic activity to probe predictive processes, especially those concerned with predicting the timing of events. This allows me to study variation in how people perceive temporal patterns using laboratory precision, but with stimuli that mimic real-world experiences. Such an approach also lends itself to studying heterogeneity within autism, as well as connections with broader domains of cognitive function that span multiple diagnostic categories. I am also interested in expanding our methodological toolkit, building novel analyses approaches for electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking that will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of temporal prediction in general, and its manifestation in autism and similar neurodevelopmental conditions in particular. My compositional practice foregrounds the listener’s experience. Although I frequently play with extended techniques and make use of non-traditional rhythmic and metrical structures, I am more interested in the emotional impact my music has on the audience than I am in experimenting with new sonic terrain. As a result, my work often includes theatrical elements and references to specific folk or popular musical traditions. In addition, I frequently draw on real-world situations or events, whether that takes the form of a musical about PTSD and sexual assault in the United States military or a chamber piece about the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. I graduated cum laude from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in theatre (with honors) and mathematics (with highest honors), earned a Master of Philosophy degree in music studies from the University of Cambridge with Ian Cross, and got my PhD in music cognition at Stanford University with Jonathan Berger.