About me

I was born and raised in Istanbul. In high school, my interests in music and the social sciences began to form. At first that interest leaned more toward ethics and political theories in sociology and philosophy, but over time it shifted toward psychology and the field of cognition. During my undergraduate studies (2017–2022) I had the opportunity to take courses from distinguished professors in the fields of cognitive psychology, like visual perception, learning, memory and music cognition at Boğaziçi University. Outside school I also joined a reading group on psychoanalytic theory, which gave me the chance to meet knowledgeable people in that field and gain familiarity with its ideas. My interest in music continued from high school: with my school band I performed frequently and we earned placements in national competitions. My individual music path continued later, and in the final year of university a high-school bandmate and I joined an ethnic-fusion group called Develer. Working in our band’s studio and collaborating with friends who studied audio engineering gave me hands-on experience in recording, mixing, and mastering. You can find my musical work under the “Music” section.

At the same time, I felt that what truly excited me was working at the intersection of music and psychology, specifically music cognition, so I decided to pursue a master’s degree in that area. I am continuing my graduate work under the supervision of Esra Mungan, who has inspired since my undergraduate studies. So far, alongside mainstream cognitive theories, I have had the opportunity to read non-mainstream cognitive theories such as Gestalt psychology (to which Professor Mungan has made significant contributions in the Turkish literature), embodied cognition, and enactivism. In my thesis, on this theoretical foundation, I am conducting an exploratory study on the perception of temporal duration within different rhythmic contexts. In the future I want to include complexity science and computational models and, from enactive and embodied perspectives, study live musical performance and its perception/experience as interacting complex systems — examining physical stimuli, bodily manifestation, mental correlates, and the perception/action coupling. I believe these studies will both advance our current knowledge of how music is perceived and help scientifically illuminate aspects of difference, diversity, and novelty in music that remain under-explored.

Personally, I believe science, art, and philosophy should remain in close contact with one another. My interest in philosophy began in high school with readings of Spinoza and Badiou, and during that period I became acquainted with thinkers such as Foucault, Sartre, Deleuze, and Guattari. Even though briefly at that time, reading the Tao Te Ching also sparked my interest in Eastern thought. In the early years of university I read more classical psychoanalysis, with Freud, Klein, and Lacan among the main figures. During my Film Studies training both Lacan and Jung appeared frequently. From the later stages of my undergraduate education onward, Wertheimer, Merleau-Ponty, and Francisco Varela have played major roles in shaping my thinking. Around the same time my interest in Japanese culture and thought began, and I encountered figures such as Kitaro Nishida and Kojin Karatani. When I read Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, I was particularly inspired by their references to Buddhism and the parallels they attempted to draw. More recently, I've been reading Gilbert Simondon, whose work I find especially compelling. His theory of individuation offers a dynamic way to think about how anything comes into being, how forms take shape within a field of tensions and potentials rather than arriving ready-made. I find his ideas rich but often quite abstract, so I try to ground them by reading his ontology alongside Gestalt theory, which keeps the focus on the dynamics of experience, and by borrowing concepts from enactivism.

In light of all this, while using the most robust and up-to-date methods, I try to maintain a non-reductionist, experience-first theoretical stance and an approach that embraces and engages with cultures and intellectual traditions. I aim to sustain this outlook both in my scientific work and in my artistic practice.