Staff profile

Hazel van der Walle is a PhD student at Durham University researching music and imagination, studying the types of thoughts people have while listening to music, from fictional stories to autobiographical memories. 

Hazel earned a Master of Science in Music, Mind & Brain from Goldsmiths University in 2024 and a First Class Honours Bachelor of Arts in Theology & Music from London School of Theology in 2022. At London School of Theology, she mastered in piano performance and completed an extended project on Synaesthesia from a theological and musical perspective, with a special focus on Messiaen in conjunction with her final recital. Her Master's project was in affiliation with NEUROLIVE – an interdisciplinary research collaboration bringing artists, scientists, and audiences together to study what makes live experience special – investigating the experience of 'liveness' in aesthetic judgements of recorded music.

Currently, she is working alongside Dr Kelly Jakubowski (Durham), Prof Elizabeth Margulis (Princeton), and Dr Wei Wu (Durham) on a Leverhulme Trust funded project 'How does music shape imagination?' In October of 2024, she visited Princeton Univeristy as a Student Research Collaborator to work more closely with Elizabeth Margulis, participate in music graduate classes and Music Cognition Lab meetings with fellow musicology graduate students, and present at Princeton's Music-Evoked Imaginings Workshop.

Hazel is an active member of Durham's Music Psychology Lab and the Centre for Research into Inner Experience (CRIE). She is a course representative for Music PhD students at Durham (2024-), organiser of Durham's ReproducibiliTea journal club, and a member of ReproducibiliTea's Steering Committee, aiming to bring more focus to Open Research in the Arts & Humanities.

Publications

van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., Jakubowski, K. (under review). MUSIFEAST-17: MUsic Stimuli for Imagination, Familiarity, Emotion, and Aesthetic STudies across 17 Genres. Behavior Research Methods. 

Wu, W., van der Walle, H. A., Margulis, E. H., Jakubowski, K. (under review). Music shapes the content of spontaneous thought. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., Jakubowski, K. (in press). Thoughtscapes in music: An examination of thought types occurring during music listening across 17 genres. Psychology of Music.

Rai, L., van der Walle, H. A., Painting, J., & Orgs, G. (2024). Experiencing liveness from recorded music. (Preprint)

• Music-evoked thoughts
• Imagination
• Visual imagery
• Memory
• Genre
• Liveness
• Aesthetics
• Synaesthesia