Friday, March 28, the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the Martha Wren Briggs Center for the Visual Arts hosted its first installment of a new lecture series, Art in Conversation, aimed at bringing professors together to discuss how their research connects to the arts. John & Audrey Leslie Associate Professor of Music and Latin American Studies Michael Iyanaga and associate professor of biology Jennifer Bestman offered insights on their work in ethnomusicology and neuroscience.
The talk was organized by the museum’s newest student group, Museum University Student Engagement, which intends to increase student interest in the visual arts by hosting events for students of all backgrounds. Muscarelle interns and MUSE co-founders Max Belmar ’25 and Sierra Manja ’26 moderated the discussion.
Each professor began with an introduction to the group. Bestman explained that her neuroscience background gives her a more scientific perspective on how the brain processes sound waves before perceiving them as music.
“When I think about music, I think about sound and how sound makes our sense organ, our ear and our cochlea work,” Bestman said. “I think about sound waves and the way the tympanic membrane and how hair cells can transduce. How do cells encode things in our environment? How does a sound wave make a neuron make an action potential?”
Bestman explained that all kinds of organisms are neurologically attuned to rhythm.
“Neurons love rhythm, brains love rhythm,” she said. “Insects are rhythmic animals and they communicate through rhythm. Our cells like to oscillate and have high periods and low periods. Not knowing anything about how the brain turns that into something emotional. I would think that we are built for rhythm.”
Iyanaga specializes in the study of Latin American music and wrote his dissertation on Brazilian music tradition. He outlined the focus of ethnomusicology, which considers music as a culturally-constructed phenomenon.
“Ethno comes from ethnography or ethnos, it comes from people,” Iyanaga said. “And musicology comes from the study of music. What the discipline suggests, and what I actually do believe, is that music is made up by people. In other words, nothing is inherently music.”
Iyanaga elaborated that the definition of music shifts based on cultural context.
“There are cultures in which music is defined very specifically,” he said. “The chanting or singing of the Quran, for instance, is not music in that particular context because music is secular. It’s something else. All sound could or could not be music depending on how you’re defining music from the outset.”
Bestman talked about her current research in neurodevelopment and the mechanisms which drive the creation of 86 billion neurons. She described the beauty of her observations at the cellular level, which she saw as a form of natural art.
“I think my cells are beautiful, they’re fluorescent, they have sparkly things that move inside them,” Bestman said. “When I show my data to the world, I’m not going to show you the ugly ones, I’m going to show you the beautiful cells that represent my work. There are choices that I make in order to tell my story to scientists.”
Iyanaga touched on the intuitive emotional response to artistic creations that his ethnomusicology research has uncovered.
“What makes something beautiful is that you can’t describe it,” he said. “It makes you feel something. If you tried to analyze the thing, you’d go, ‘I like the way it makes me feel.’ What’s most exciting is when you’re drawn to something intuition-wise.”
Iyanaga’s research on Brazilian music focuses on the social phenomenon of collective singing, where communities create music for enjoyment rather than as a commercial product. He shared that these forms of music are rarely considered art.
“What I think is most interesting is people who make music who don’t call themselves musicians,” Iyanaga said. “And no one else would either. That’s fun to me.”
Bestman recalled a similar experience she had in an undergraduate art history course where she learned about traditional quilt-making. The course expanded her perspective on what should be considered artistic creation in a modern world.
“Why do we admire modern art and abstract painting when women have been creating similar things out of pieces of cloth for generations? It’s a practice that we should admire as much as any fancy painter,” Bestman said.
Bestman highlighted her artistic considerations when presenting her neuroscience research. She attributed her aesthetic mind to a liberal arts view of education.
“Not every scientist has an eye or a vision or cares about communication in that way,” she said. “In every discipline, there are plenty of stick-in-the-mud people who think that what they do is just going to have an audience with [scientists]. Maybe it’s because they were trained in places that didn’t have liberal arts, and they don’t read anything other than science and have a very narrow mind about what’s important.”
The discussion ended by considering how the arts and STEM research could strengthen each other. Iyanaga discussed the segmentation of academic disciplines under department names despite being highly interconnected.
“The first thing you learn in a basic drawing class is geometry, how to parse things into geometrical shapes,” Iyanaga said. “Is that not math?”
Bestman shared her vision for spearheading an interdisciplinary course where art students could learn biological principles that would bolster their creativity.
“I would love to teach a course using microscopy for people who aren’t biologists,” Bestman said. “To use those tools to be inspired in what they do as artists. Something where you could have communication between these different silos in our world.”
Muscarelle intern Aman Khera ’28 helped organize the event. He liked that the discussion united professors from seemingly opposite disciplines and hopes to continue promoting interdisciplinary exchange in future MUSE events.
“We’re still looking to figure out the perfect combination, but I think today was a really great representation,” he said. “You don’t really think of music and neuroscience as going in the same conversation, but for an hour we got to hear two experts in their fields talk about what they’re really passionate about. That’s what the Art in Conversation series is about.”
