Staff profile

Hazel van der Walle is a PhD student at Durham University researching Music & Imagination, studying the types of thoughts people have while listening to music, including autobiographical memories, fictional stories and narratives, sensory details, and abstract colours and shapes. 

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 Prof 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. (2025). Thoughtscapes in music: An examination of thought types occurring during music listening across 17 genres. Psychology of Music. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356251346654

van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., Jakubowski, K. (2025). MUSIFEAST-17: MUsic Stimuli for Imagination, Familiarity, Emotion, and Aesthetic STudies across 17 genres. Behavior Research Methods 57, 204 (2025). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02724-0

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

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

Journal Article

• Thoughtscapes in music: An examination of thought types occurring during music listening across 17 genres
  
  van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., & Jakubowski, K. (2025). Thoughtscapes in music: An examination of thought types occurring during music listening across 17 genres. Psychology of Music. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356251346654
• MUSIFEAST-17: MUsic Stimuli for imagination, familiarity, emotion, and Aesthetic STudies across 17 genres
  
  van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., & Jakubowski, K. (2025). MUSIFEAST-17: MUsic Stimuli for imagination, familiarity, emotion, and Aesthetic STudies across 17 genres. Behavior Research Methods, 57(7), Article 204. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02724-0