My name is Jesse Mark, and I'm a researcher in music psychology and neuroengineering. I study how music communicates emotion, how performers express their emotional intentions, and how musical interaction can create connections between people.
My studies focus on the interplay between emotional intent, musical expressivity, physiological response, and brain activity during musical performance. I'm particularly interested in what happens when people make music together: how performers coordinate their behavior, how their brains and bodies synchronize, how their emotional experiences converge, and how these processes can lead to feelings of affiliation, trust, and social connection. Ultimately, I want to understand how these mechanisms contribute to the powerful sense of unity that can sometimes emerge during shared musical experiences—a phenomenon known as collective effervescence.
My research takes a multimodal and interdisciplinary approach, combining techniques including EEG, fNIRS, physiological measures, behavioral and performance metrics, and self-report. I develop computational and processing pipelines for turning brain and body signals into understandable and manipulable data through neuroadaptive and neuromodulation methods.
My background spans biomedical engineering, neuroscience, and music psychology. I have studied learning and performance in flight simulator training, developed neuroadaptive approaches to skill learning, investigated the effects of electrical neurostimulation on performance, and studied how emotional states influence musical expression in experienced pianists. I am particularly interested in combining perspectives that are often studied separately: brain and body, performer and audience, individual and group, and controlled laboratory experiments and real-world performance.
My long-term goal is to establish an interdisciplinary research program around live music performance. I want to elucidate the mechanisms through which music affects emotions in the embodied mind, understand how interpersonal synchrony and shared emotional experience emerge during performance, and develop methods that can enhance the power of live music to improve individual and social wellbeing.
Outside of research, my hobbies include playing tabletop RPGs like DnD and Call of Cthulhu, journaling and writing with fountain pens, photography and cloudspotting, and translating and subtitling anime.