Faculty Spotlight: Michael Hove
Michael Hove grew up in northern Wisconsin. His family moved to Wisconsin from Georgia when he was 4 years old. His kindergarten teachers mistook his southern accent for a speech disorder; they sent him to speech therapy where he was “cured” and learned to speak properly like people in Fargo. As a youngster, he was into sports and playing piano and drums. Michael Hove attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he and 3 friends proposed and designed an interdisciplinary major in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (PNP). Twenty-five years later, PNP is one of their most popular majors, and will likely be Dr. Hove’s most impactful academic contribution.
After college, his friends were moving on to serious things like grad school, med school, and desk jobs, but he was unsure of his direction, so he ventured to Germany to figure things out. There, he translated for Siemens, guided tours of Munich and the Dachau Concentration Camp, and worked in a psychology research lab. His psychological research led him to graduate school at Cornell, where he studied music, movement, and the brain. He received a PhD in Psychology in 2009 from Cornell.
After grad school, he held research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Sciences (Leipzig Germany), Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Harvard Medical School. In these positions, Dr. Hove researched rhythm, timing, and music. He developed applications of music and rhythm to disorders such as Parkinson’s and ADHD. His recent work has examined musical groove, how people move along with the beat, and how rhythmic drumming can induce altered states of consciousness. His work appears in journals including Music Perception, Current Biology, Cerebral Cortex, and PNAS.
In 2015, Dr. Hove arrived at Fitchburg State, where he continues to study music, movement, and altered states. He teaches courses on Sensation and Perception, Cognitive Neuroscience, Biological Psychology, Stats and Research Methods, and seminars on the Science of Meditation and Music and the Brain. Next year he will teach a seminar on Psychedelics, Mental Health, and the Brain. In his sabbatical last year in Montreal, he studied music and trance and published a free textbook on Biological Psychology.
He and his wife Abbie have two boys, Oliver (7) and Henry (4), and live just up the hill from campus. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, playing music and ice hockey, and hanging with his family.
Select Publications
Hove, M. J., Martinez, S.1, & Stupacher, J. (2020). Feel the bass: Music presented to tactile and auditory modalities increases aesthetic appreciation and body movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149, 1137–1147. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000708
Hove, M. J., Vuust, P., & Stupacher, J. (2019). Increased levels of bass in popular music recordings 1955–2016 and their relation to loudness. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145(4), 2247–2253. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5097587
Hove, M. J., Gravel, N.1, Spencer, R.M., & Valera, E. M. (2017). Finger tapping and the phase correction response in adults with ADHD: Pre-attentive sensorimotor timing is unimpaired in ADHD. Experimental Brain Research, 235, 3663-3672. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-5089-y
Hove, M. J., Stelzer, J., Nierhaus, T., Thiel, S., Gundlach, C., Margulies, D., van Dijk, K., Turner, R., Keller, P. E., & Merker, B. (2016). Brain network reconfiguration and perceptual decoupling during an absorptive state of consciousness. Cerebral Cortex, 26, 3116-3124. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhv137
Stupacher, J.1, Hove, M. J., & Janata, P. (2016). Audio features underlying perceived groove and sensorimotor synchronization in music. Music Perception, 33, 571-589. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2016.33.5.571
Hove, M. J., Marie, C., Bruce, I. C., & Trainor, L. J. (2014). Superior time perception for lower musical pitch explains why bass-ranged instruments lay down musical rhythms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(28), 10383-10388. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1402039111
Hove, M. J., Fairhurst, M., Kotz, S. A., & Keller, P. E. (2013). Synchronizing with auditory and visual rhythms: An fMRI assessment of modality differences and encoding reliability. NeuroImage, 67, 313-321. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.11.032
Stupacher, J.1, Hove, M. J., Novembre, G., Schütz-Bosbach, S., & Keller, P. E. (2013). Musical groove modulates motor excitability: A TMS investigation. Brain and Cognition, 82, 127-136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2013.03.003
Hove, M. J., Suzuki, K. 1, Uchitomi, H. 1, Orimo, S., & Miyake, Y. (2012). Interactive rhythmic auditory stimulation reinstates natural 1/f timing in gait of Parkinson’s patients. PLoS ONE, 7(3): e32600. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032600
Hove, M. J. & Risen, J. L. (2009). It’s all in the timing: Interpersonal synchrony increases affiliation. Social Cognition, 27(6), 949-961. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2009.27.6.949
For full publication list and links to papers go to sites.google.com/site/michaeljhove/publications