Episode 27 - (Season 2, Episode 8) - Marisa Hoeschele

Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast

Scientist and metal drummer

Marisa Hoeschele received an honours B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada in 2006. After that she completed an M.Sc. and PhD in Psychology with a specialization in Comparative Cognition and Behaviour at the University of Alberta, Canada.

In 2013 she moved to Vienna as a post-doc and built the budgie lab at the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. In October 2018 she started her own group, known as the “Musicality and Bioacoustics” group, at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This institute has researchers from many different disciplines all studying problems in acoustics: however the first animal studies were not conducted on site until this year in April when the budgie lab was moved to the institute. Marisa studies how different animals, including humans, perceive and produce sounds. The broader goal is to understand where music and language come from and what other similar capacities might exist in the animal kingdom.

Marisa is the first guest I've had on who had a pop filter on her mic. That's neither here nor there but it's still a thing.

We talked, of course, about how Marisa got into the field in the first place, a bit about Austria and, obviously about her work. Her work is interdisciplinary and we talked a bit about how this sort of thing is important not just in animal cognition, but in any field.

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