Staff profile

Nashra Ahmad is a Music Cognition and Psychology researcher, currently pursuing PhD at Durham University supported by the Durham Doctoral Studentship. She completed her Masters in Cognitive Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar in 2021, and her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology (first class honours) from Aligarh Muslim University in 2018. Her predoctoral work (2021- 2022) included studying perception and pupil dilation responses to consonant and dissonant intervals among Indian participants. She is currently working on rhythm perception and entrainment for her PhD, focusing on learning processes of isochronous and non-isochronous North-Indian (Hindustani) Classical Rhythms. She has presented her work at various international conferences and published her interdisciplinary work in collaboration with renowned researchers. At Durham University, she is an active member of the Music and Science Lab and an editorial assistant of DURMS.

Nashra is also an educator who has taught guitar and basic music theory at the elementary to middle school level in India. She is currently a Foundation Teaching Fellow for the foundation year in Psychology at Durham Centre for Academic Development (DCAD), Durham University. She enjoys playing the guitar, singing, landscape painting, and sculpting.

Published Work

Miyapuram, K. P., Ahmad, N., Pandey, P., & Lomas, J. D. (2022). Electroencephalography (EEG) dataset during naturalistic music listening comprising different genres with familiarity and enjoyment ratings. Data in Brief, 45, 108663.

James Derek Lomas, Albert Lin, Suzanne Dikker, Deborah Forster, Maria Luce Lupetti, Gijs... Nashra Ahmad, Krishna Miyapuram, Tim Mullen, Patrick Cooper, Willem van der Maden (2022). Resonance as a design strategy for AI and social robots. Frontiers in neurorobotics, 16

Pankaj Pandey, Nashra Ahmad, Krishna Miyapuram, Derek Lomas (2021). Predicting Dominant Beat Frequency from Brain Responses While Listening to Music. IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), 2021, pp. 3058-3064

Conference Presentations

Learning (long and extensive) patterns of North Indian classical rhythms: A sequence learning approach (2023). International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology 23. University of Sheffield.

Preference of Consonant Chords over Dissonant Chords, Revealed through Subjective Ratings and Pupil Dilation Responses (2022). Music & Eye-Tracking – Conference 2022 - Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik.

Neural Correlates to Consonant and Dissonant Musical Chords (2021). 16th ICMPC- 11th ESCOM 2021.

• Rhythm Perception
• Pattern Recognition
• Music and Entrainment
• Music and Sensorimotor Synchronisation
• Consonance and Dissonance Perception

• 2022: Durham Doctoral Studentship: Fellowship to fund the completion of PhD at Durham University.
• 2021: Sabarmati Bridge Fellowship: Government of India funding to complete Pre-doctoral research work at IIT Gandhinagar.