Roni Granot is a senior lecturer (since 2008) in the Musicology Dept., at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She wrote her MA thesis under the supervision of Prof. Hillel Pratt head of Evoked Potential Laboratory at the Technion Haifa and Prof. Dalia Cohen (Israel Prize winner – the Hebrew University) studying brain responses to musical intervals. She later won the Fulbirght United-States Israel Educational Foundation scholarship and spent two years at the Cognitive Psychophysiology Lab at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana headed then by Prof. Emanuel Donchin  where she completed her PhD research on electrophysiological and behavior indices of musical expectancy.

At the center of her research are questions related to our response to music: How is music processed in our brain? Which cognitive processes are involved? And what is the relationship between these processes and music theory? For example, according to music theory and compositional rules, relationships between successive chords are based on acoustic similarity ("low level") and harmonic relatedness ("high level"). Granot & Hai (2009) showed that even listeners with no musical training have an exquisite sensitivity to both types of relationships. In this specific case, behavioral measures (RT) did not expose this sensitivity but brain measures (Event Related Brain potentials) clearly did. In contrast, in several other studies Granot and her colleagues (Eitan & Granot, 2008; Granot and Jacoby, 2011, 2012) showed that the association between music theory and cognition is weaker for larger scale contexts. Concepts such as coherence, thematic unity and tonal unity do not necessarily reflect cognitive percepts, even in listeners with musical training. Such disparities between music theory and music cognition may be informative of our cognitive system on the one hand, and the nature of music as an art form on the other.

Other research interests of Dr. Granot include

1. Music and emotions
2. Music, space and motion
3. Genetic aspects of musical memory
4. the Human voice and out of tune singing
5. Consonance and dissonance: nature or nurture?
   

In 2009-2012 Granot served as chair of the Musicology Dept., at the Hebrew University. In 2012 the Dept., received the Rectro's prize for "Outstanding Department". She Chairs the Clarica and Fred Davidson Senior Lectureship in Musicology.