Beau Sievers

Cognitive and social neuroscience research

I am a research scientist in the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory advised by Professor Jamil Zaki and a research associate in Psychology at Harvard University advised by Professors Joshua Greene and Leslie Valiant. I completed my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College, advised by Professor Thalia Wheatley.

I am also a composer and performer on percussion and electronics, and was a founding organizer of Indexical.

Contact

Please feel free to email me.

Publications

Teaching

Software

fmri_go

fmri_go is open source software for presenting timelocked stimuli in an fMRI scanner and recording participant responses using PsychoPy. This software is in active development—use at your own risk.

Bouncing Ball

Bouncing Ball is open source software for comparing the dynamics of music and movement as described in Sievers, B., Polansky, L., Casey, M., & Wheatley, T. (2013). Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(1), 70-75.

Morphological Metrics

Morphological Metrics is a Ruby implementation of metrics described in Larry Polansky's article Morphological Metrics. Larry's work on Morphological Metrics is of interest for anybody who wants to quantitatively compare contours; I came to it as a composer and continue to return regularly as a scientist.

Ruby PCSet

Ruby PCSet is a simple Ruby library for performing musical pitch-class set theory operations. It has a few nice things which similar tools lack, including evaluation of some properties described by Balzano (coherence, uniqueness) and Huron (aggregate dyadic consonance).