Neta Spiro is Professor of Music Psychology at the Royal College of Music (RCM). A member of the Centre for Performance Science, she leads research, public engagement, knowledge exchange, and teaching in creative health and music making and interaction. She explores, in particular, the experiences and health effects of engaging in music activities.
Together with Katie Rose Sanfilippo, she coined the term ‘musical care’ to reflect the diversity of musical activities and roles that music can have, and her work has had direct applications for policy at local and national levels, as well as in family care organisations and higher education institutions.
As part of her work on music asking and interaction, Neta explores overlapping cognition in different contexts, from jazz and classical ensembles to musical care activities and museums. This work has applications in understanding the extent of shared understanding in music making, as well as its correlates and its possible connection to experiences such as those of social connection.
Neta specialises in bringing together public engagement activities with fundamental research in live science contexts. She has most recently explored this as part of the Singing Together project, which explores how people with a variety of musical backgrounds experience their duet singing.
In terms of knowledge exchange, Neta prioritises interdisciplinary, international, and intercultural collaboration, and she set up and co-leads the Musical Care International Network. With this network, she aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with different perspectives, and to develop innovative ways of working as a network, from co-published academic articles to public dialogues to distributed models of undertaking fundamental research.
Neta’s undergraduate and postgraduate teaching includes modules on arts in health and care, and music in health and care, and she welcomes enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in her areas of expertise.
Neta chairs the Music Therapy Charity Research Committee and is an associate editor for journals including Psychology of Music and Music and Science. She is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London, and an Affiliate Researcher at the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, New York, and the Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge.