I’d been keeping quiet about my thesis research prior to running experiments, but an update is now long over due.

My dissertation is on the measurement of changes in respiration during music listening, capturing when and how a (seated, attentive) listener’s breathing changes. It’s messy measurements from multiple data sets, and musical stimuli of many genres, and lots of heavy non-parametric statistics, and it makes me smile every time I work on it. Considering the respiratory cycle is not terribly difficult to track passively, the more information we can gather via this discrete signal, the better, right? There are a lot of potential uses, a lot of different types of information we might glean from this signal, but I am hesitant to write out these possibilities before more I’ve completed a few more tests.