Alexander Khalil

I am a senior lecturer in music at the Department of Music, University College Cork. I am also a visiting senior lecturer of research at the Social Genetic Developmental Psychiatry (SGDP) Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London.

My work focuses on the intersubjective experience of time. This phenomenon is perhaps nowhere more exquisitely manifest, empirically observable, and subject to artistic exploration than in music and musicality. As a musician and music scholar, I specialise in Byzantine chant (the traditional music of the Greek Orthodox church), music of the Middle East, and music of Southeast Asia.

Before starting my PhD, I served as executive director at the Center for World Music, in San Diego California. Working with ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown, and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, I developed the World Music in the Schools programme, which continues to thrive today. My doctoral work, undertaken at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), informed by my lifelong experience as a cantor in the Greek Orthodox tradition, investigated the experience of temporality amongst cantors at ancient centres of our tradition, a direction I have more recently extended to communities in diaspora.

Deeply interested in interpersonal timing and time perception in music, I joined the department of Cognitive Science at UCSD as a postdoctoral scholar and fellow at the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. Training in cognitive science, I developed methods to investigate interpersonal timing both at the behavioural and neural level in the context of musical performance and interaction. Underlying my approach is the idea of taking the group level as the fundamental unit of analysis. This idea, which has guided all my work, re-centres any methodology on culture, taking lived experience as “ground truth”, the basis for any measurement relating to cultural phenomena, like music. In 2014 I joined the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation as a scientist where, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, I worked to develop synchronised group electroencephalography (EEG) measures for use in ecological environments from concerts to classrooms. Stemming from this work, I am currently investigating methods for achieving neuromodulation through the use of Audio Augmented Reality (AAR), on a project called SoundMind. This project, a research collaboration between UCC, and King’s College London, is funded by a grant from the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute.

At UCC, I teach classes in ethnomusicology, focusing on middle eastern music, music cognition and perception, and Balinese gamelan. I also supervise postdoctoral, PhD, and MA research projects.