08/06/2026
Next up is Dr. Alessandro Ansani! 🎶
Terve! I’m Ale. I’m an Academy Research Fellow at the CoE and the PI of the FRAMES project (Fine-graining Audiovisual Crossmodal Correspondences, funded by the Research Council of Finland).
During my PhD in Psychology & Cognitive Science, I began my research activity by studying how film music influences our interpretations of movie scenes, mainly through questionnaires and psychophysiological studies (eye-tracking & pupillometry). I was (and still am) really fascinated by how much of the meaning of movie scenes is determined by the soundtrack! Later, I became more interested in the broad field of Music & Emotion. In 2025, I authored the Italian validation of the Brief Music in Mood Regulation scale (B-MMR). More recently, thanks to the collaboration with Dr Nicola Di Stefano (Italian National Research Council) and Prof Charles Spence (University of Oxford), I got drawn to cross-modal associations — that is, anything that happens when we couple music with stimuli from other sensory modalities: sight, smell, touch, and even taste!
At the moment, I’m working on a cross-modal multisensory mapping of musical intervals, mainly to answer very fundamental questions such as “Are minor seconds more bitter than minor sixths?”, “What is the spiciest interval?”, or “What’s the colour of major sevenths?”.
Besides, I’m what you’d probably call a stats nerd, or, more formally, a data analyst/psychometrician, so I take care of some of the statistical parts of many research projects (e.g., MusiConnect, Rhythm of Life, MusPro, etc.). In the last three years, I totally fell in love with Bayesian statistics, so I’ve now become a staunch (but still tolerant) Bayesian! Three random fun facts to conclude:
1. I play many instruments and love rearranging songs and composing soundtracks.
2. I’m Italian, so I love cooking pasta, but I'm not judgmental about it.
3. The Myers–Briggs personality test says I’m an ENTP-A (Assertive Debater: Extraverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving), but the psychometric validity of such tests is highly questionable, which — ironically — just confirms that I’m a debater. So we’re stuck in a loop now.
Cheers!
