Fred Cummins is co-director of the cognitive science programme at University College Dublin. He obtained a PhD with joint major in Cognitive Science and Linguistics in 1997 from Indiana University. His empirical work has been largely concerned with joint speech or chant, as found in prayer, protest, sports, education, and beyond. Joint speech arises any time multiple people utter the same words at the same time. This topic raises questions of relevance to many areas, including ritual studies, anthropology, music and ethnomusicology, neuroscience, phonetics, movement studies, and the philosophy of enaction. In joint speech, we approach human vocal coordination in a way that obliterates any strong distinction between speech and music. Joint speech is the topic of a recent book “The Ground From Which We Speak: Joint Speech and the Collective Subject” (2018, Cambridge Scholars). His more recent work combines themes from embodied and enactive cognition to try to understand how we are multiply constituted and how we might seek to understand ourselves as incorrigably plural. This challenge leads to a form of Dialogical Realism that eschews certainty to work instead towards Joint Actionable Consensus.

Renee Timmers is Reader in Psychology of Music at The University of Sheffield, where she directs the MAs in Psychology of Music, and the research centre Music, Mind, Machine in Sheffield. Trained in musicology and psychology in the Netherlands, her research employs interdisciplinary methods and techniques to enhance the understanding of how music is performed and experienced. Specifically, her work includes publications on expressive music performance, expression and perception of emotion in music, interactions between music cognition and emotion, and cross-modal experiences of music. Recently published volumes include Expressiveness in music performance: Empirical approaches across styles and cultures (OUP, 2014) and The Routledge companion to music cognition (Routledge, 2017). She has served on the editorial board of several of the leading journals in psychology of music and is currently President of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). Within this role, she continues to promote interdisciplinary perspectives on music cognition, and the organisation of virtual and live events to connect researchers from geographically as well as disciplinary diverse areas.

Anthony Chemero got his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from Indiana University in 1999. From then to 2012, he taught at Franklin & Marshall College (F&M), where he was Professor of Psychology. In 2012, he became Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. Anthony'’s research is both philosophical and empirical. It is focused on questions related to dynamical modelling, ecological psychology, artificial life and complex systems. He is author of more than 70 articles and the book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009, MIT Press), which was a finalist for the Lakatos Award. His second book, co-authored with Stephan Kaufer, will appear on Polity Press. He is currently editing the second edition of the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences.

Dylan van der Schyff is a research fellow in the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD from Simon Fraser University, Canada, and holds master’s degrees in humanities (Simon Fraser University) and music psychology (University of Sheffield). His scholarship draws on recent developments in embodied cognitive science and interdisciplinary musicology to explore questions related to how and why music is meaningful for human beings. Much of this research focuses on developing possibilities for enactive and 4E cognition in practical areas such as performance and music education. Dylan's published work appears in journals that cover a broad spectrum of fields in the sciences and humanities. He has also contributed chapters to edited editions, including the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Perspectives on Assessment in Music Education (Oxford University Press). He is currently leading a coauthored book project entitled 'Musical Bodies, Musical Minds: Enactive Cognition and the Meaning of Human Musicality'. It will be published by the MIT Press in 2020.