Staff profile

Dr Caroline Curwen is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Durham University researching "Musical Evoked Imaginings in Synaesthetic and Non-Synaesthetic Expert Musicians." Caroline studied clarinet and academic studies at the Royal Northern College of Music and holds a doctorate from the University of Sheffield. Caroline has published extensively on synaesthesia related to music, with a focus on embodied and enactive music cognition and sensorimotor theory. Her previous research explores how the shapes and colours experienced by some individuals when listening to music may be conceptual rather than purely perceptual. She argues that music-colour synaesthesia can be understood as a sensorimotor phenomenon within the framework of embodied and enactive accounts of music cognition.  Caroline serves as a consulting editor for Musicae Scientiae and is the Treasurer of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). Additionally, Caroline is a Chartered Accountant. 

 

• My research explores how people imagine stories, images, and experiences when they listen to music. I focus on musically evoked narrative imaginings (MENI) in expert musicians, including those with music–colour synaesthesia, to understand how imagination unfolds alongside musical structure. More broadly, I am interested in how these insights connect with new questions about creativity and how emerging technologies such as AI might help us compare human and computer-generated musical experience.

• 2025: Appointed Associate Editor, Psychology of Music (Editorial Board).:
• 2025: Invited Keynote, Fourth International Conference Psychology and Music – Interdisciplinary Encounters (PAM-IE), Ljubljana, Slovenia (October 2026).:
• 2024: Invited jury member for the PhD defence of Umut Eldem, Royal Conservatoire Antwerp.:
• 2024: Appointed Consulting Editor, Musicae Scientiae (three-year term).:
• 2024 - 2027: Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, Durham University — project: Musically Evoked Imaginings in Synaesthetic and Non-Synaesthetic Expert Musicians.:
• 2022: Treasurer, European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM).:
• 2022: Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE).:

Journal Article

• Action, emotion, and music-colour synaesthesia: an examination of sensorimotor and emotional responses in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes
  
  Curwen, C., Timmers, R., & Schiavio, A. (2024). Action, emotion, and music-colour synaesthesia: an examination of sensorimotor and emotional responses in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes. Psychological Research, 88(2), 348-362. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01856-2
• The role of synaesthesia in reading written musical key signatures.
  
  Curwen, C. (2022). The role of synaesthesia in reading written musical key signatures. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(10), 2284-2299. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001193
• Music-Colour Synaesthesia: A Sensorimotor Account
  
  Curwen, C. (2022). Music-Colour Synaesthesia: A Sensorimotor Account. Musicae Scientiae, 26(2), 388-407. https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864920956295
• Music-colour synaesthesia: Concept, context and qualia
  
  Curwen, C. (2018). Music-colour synaesthesia: Concept, context and qualia. Consciousness and Cognition, 61, 94-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2018.04.005