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Elizabeth Margulis discusses her latest book TRANSPORTED with Daniel Shanahan
Featured Book
Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams
A song comes on—and suddenly, you’re somewhere else. Reliving past heartbreak. Picturing a serene future. Imagining a fantastical scene. Across genres, music has an uncanny ability to carry us into distinct inner worlds. In Transported, acclaimed music cognition researcher Elizabeth Margulis explores the phenomenon of musical daydreams—the vivid, spontaneous, emotionally charged images, stories, and memories we lapse into while listening to music—and argues that these everyday reveries offer a powerful and underappreciated window into how we think, feel, and connect. Combining cutting-edge neuroscience, psychology, ethnography, and revelations from her own teaching and pathbreaking research, Margulis shows not only that musical imaginings are widespread and meaningful—but also that daydreams which seem deeply personal are often widely shared. Music can alleviate anxiety, ignite creativity, and foster connection in our increasingly fragmented era. At a time when attention is perpetually under siege, Transported makes a powerful case for music as one of the last spaces where the mind is still free to wander—and reminds us that these wanderings are more meaningful and more important to our individual and collective well-being than we’ve ever realized.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Join us and enter TRANSPORTED (Liveright), the new book by acclaimed music cognition researcher Elizabeth Margulis wherein she explores the phenomenon of musical daydreams—the vivid, spontaneous, emotionally charged images, stories, and memories we lapse into while listening to music—and argues that these everyday reveries offer a powerful and underappreciated window into how we think, feel, and connect. Elizabeth will be in conversation with Daniel Shanahan.
Doors and minibar open at 5:30PM
Featured Author
Elizabeth Margulis
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind and The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction, and the forthcoming Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams (Liveright, 2026) directs the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University. Her research pursues questions that lie at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. She was also trained as a pianist.
In Conversation With
Daniel Shanahan
Daniel Shanahan holds a PhD, University of Dublin, Trinity College Coordinator, music theory and cognition program. Daniel Shanahan’s research incorporates music-analytic, computational, and experimental methods to better understand the cognitive and communicative constraints of music. His interests include corpus studies, music and emotion, the oral transmission of music, the computational analysis of jazz and folk music, as well as machine learning models and generative artificial intelligence (AI). Daniel’s work has been published in Music Perception, The Journal of New Music Research, Musicae Scientiae, The Journal of Jazz Studies, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Cognition and Emotion, Frontiers in Psychology, and Empirical Musicology Review, among others. He contributed chapters on tonality, harmony, and counterpoint to The Routledge Companion to Music Cognition (Routledge, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy (Routledge, 2020), and has chapters in Over and Over Again: Exploring Repetition in Popular Music (Bloomsbury, 2018), as well as multiple chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), for which he is also serving as co-editor. He has contributed book reviews to Theory and Practice, and Music Theory Online. From 2016 until 2022, Shanahan served as co-editor of Empirical Musicology Review, after having served as the journal’s managing editor from 2012 until 2016. He has also served on the editorial boards of Music Theory Spectrum, Indiana Theory Review, Musicae Scientiae and The Journal of Creative Music Systems. He currently serves as the treasurer for the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. In 2024, Daniel received the Mentorship Award from the Society of Music Perception and Cognition, and in 2023 he, along with his co-editors, received the Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award from the Society for Music Theory for Volume 8 of the journal Engaging Students: Beyond Western Musicalities. He is also the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the School of Music at Ohio State University, as well as both the Rising Faculty Research Award and the Undergraduate Teaching Award from Louisiana State University. Before arriving at Northwestern, Shanahan held positions at Ohio State University (where he ran the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Lab), Louisiana State University (where he founded the Music Computation and Cognition Lab), and the University of Virginia.
About the Venue
Bookends & Beginnings
Eclectic indie store in the heart of downtown Evanston. New & used books and gifts. With an outstanding cookbook section and kids’ books in foreign languages.
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