Skip to main content

Staff profile

Overview

Hazel van der Walle

Combined Role

Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Combined Role in the Department of Music

Biography

Hazel van der Walle is a PhD student at Durham University researching music and imagination — what happens in your mind when you listen to music? From the images, stories, and memories, to weird and wonderful abstract visuals, motions, and sensations. Hazel is facinated by our strange inner worlds that music influences, shapes, and colours. Aren't you curious to explore?

Hazel earned her Master of Science in Music, Mind & Brain from Goldsmiths University in 2024 and a First Class Honours Bachelor of Arts in Theology & Music from London School of Theology in 2022. At London School of Theology, she mastered in piano performance and completed an extended project on synaesthesia from a theological and musical perspective, with a special focus on Messiaen in conjunction with her final recital. Her Master's project was in affiliation with NEUROLIVE – an interdisciplinary research collaboration bringing artists, scientists, and audiences together to study what makes live experience special – investigating the experience of 'liveness' in aesthetic judgements of recorded music.

Currently, she is working on a Leverhulme Trust funded project 'How does music shape imagination?', specialising in her third year on qualitative research methods using both human-driven manual analysis and computational natural language processing. You can explore her GitHub repositories to openly and publically see what she is up to github.com/HazelvdW/.

Hazel is a member of the ReproducibiliTea Advisory Board and a former Steering Committee member. She is a strong advocate of open research with a particular focus on engagement across and between disciplines, informed by her interdisciplinary background in the arts, humanites, and sciences. Hazel has developed discipline-specific resources for the initiative, including the “Open Research... in the Arts?” reading list, and is a published researcher in the fields of music cognition and transparent methodology.

Outputs

van der Walle, H. A., Margulis, E. H., Jakubowski, K. (2026). Basslines, Bodies, and Beehive Haircuts: What do we think about when we listen to music? PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/z8rfa_v1 

Wolsink, L. N., Manduch, P., Licata, A. E., van der Walle, H. A., Vornhagen, J. B., Sharma, H., Ngiam, W. X. Q., Muhoozi, M., Marmyleva, A., Jaquiery, M., Crüwell, S., & Gellersen, H. (2026). Ten Simple Rules for Running a ReproducibiliTea Journal Club. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/swg38_v1

van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., Jakubowski, K. (2025). Thoughtscapes in music: An examination of thought types occurring during music listening across 17 genres. Psychology of Music. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356251346654

van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., Jakubowski, K. (2025). MUSIFEAST-17: MUsic Stimuli for Imagination, Familiarity, Emotion, and Aesthetic STudies across 17 genres. Behavior Research Methods 57, 204 (2025). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02724-0

Rai, L., van der Walle, H. A., Painting, J., & Orgs, G. (2024). Experiencing liveness from recorded music. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ef3ry

Research interests

  • Music and Imagination
  • Thoughts during music listening
  • Mixed methods qualitative & quantitative research
  • Visual imagery
  • Memories
  • Genre
  • Liveness
  • Aesthetics
  • Synaesthesia

Publications

Journal Article