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Assistant Professor · University of Amsterdam

Makiko
Sadakata
Music Cognition

I study how people perceive and learn sounds — from speech rhythms and musical pitch to auditory feedback in language learning. My research sits at the intersection of music cognition, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience, and is based at the Music Cognition Group, ILLC, University of Amsterdam.

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20 Apr 2026
Workshop: Spectral Percepts — Cognition, Biology and the Origins of Musicality
Participated in this interdisciplinary workshop at the Lorentz Center, Leiden (20–24 April 2026).
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1 Apr 2026
New paper: BEiMM — a Bayesian emotions-in-music model (Cognition and Emotion)
Timmers, R., Peck, L. S. L., Arthurs, Y., & Sadakata, M. (2026). Introducing and testing a Bayesian emotions-in-music model (BEiMM): A cross-cultural investigation of Japanese and UK younger and older listeners.
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26 Mar 2026
Article in Iwanami Kagaku, special issue on How Far Has the Science of Music Come? (音楽の科学はどこまできたか)
Article on how the brain distinguishes music from language, published in Iwanami's science journal 科学, April 2026.
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1 Jan 2026
New paper: Pitch accent speakers and the speech-to-song illusion (Psychological Research)
Sadakata, M., Nobbe Smyth, M., van 't Veer, M., & Tanaka, A. (2026). Pitch accent speakers exhibit speech-to-song transformation accompanied by reduced musicality ratings: a cross-linguistic study.
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