Rate My Professor Dylan van der Schyff

Dylan van der Schyff is Associate Professor in Music (Jazz and Improvisation) at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, where he coordinates the honours and graduate programs in Jazz and Improvisation and lectures in drumming, ensemble practice, and related areas. He joined the University of Melbourne as Senior Lecturer in 2020. Prior to this, he held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford (2017-2019). Van der Schyff earned his PhD in Education from Simon Fraser University (2017), a Master’s degree in Humanities from Simon Fraser University, and a Master’s degree in Music Psychology from the University of Sheffield. As an improvising percussionist, he has contributed to nearly 200 recordings across jazz, free improvisation, sound art, experimental, electronic, and new music genres, including cross-disciplinary collaborations in dance, theatre, film, and spoken word.

Van der Schyff’s research integrates embodied cognitive science, phenomenological philosophy, and interdisciplinary musicology to investigate the meaning of music for human beings, with a focus on 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended), improvisation, creativity, performance, musical emotions, empathy, and music education. He has authored or co-authored numerous publications, including the book Musical Bodies, Musical Minds: Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality (MIT Press, 2022, with Andrea Schiavio and David J. Elliott) and the edited volume Towards a Meaningful Instrumental Music Education: Methods, Perspectives, and Challenges (Frontiers Media, 2021). Key articles include “Musical creativity and the embodied mind: Exploring the possibilities of 4E cognition and dynamical systems theory” (Music & Science, 2018, cited 222 times), “Enacting musical emotions. Sense-making, dynamic systems, and the embodied mind” (Frontiers in Psychology, 2017, cited 144 times), and “4E music pedagogy and the principles of self-organization” (Empirical Musicology Review, 2018, cited 123 times). His work has garnered over 1,100 citations and appears in journals spanning the sciences and humanities, as well as chapters in Oxford University Press handbooks. Van der Schyff serves as an editor for research topics such as “Community series: Towards a meaningful instrumental music education” and delivers keynote lectures on topics like musical improvisation and creative practice research.