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 affilation 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 Centre for Research into Inner Experience (CRIE), course representative for Music PhD students at Durham (2024-), and organiser of Durham's ReproducibiliTea journal club, discussing all things Open Research.

Publications

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