Music, healing, and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) are areas of deep research shared by Dr. Julian Thayer and Milford Graves. Join Dr. Thayer (bass) and Scott Robinson (saxophone) in a performance lecture presenting scientific findings and the physiological impact of sonics beats that preoccupied Graves until the end of his life.

Dr. Julian F. Thayer studied music composition at Berklee College of Music and received his Ph.D. from New York University in psychophysiology with a minor in quantitative methods. Dr. Thayer is currently Distinguished University Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine and the Ohio Eminent Scholar Professor in Health Psychology Emeritus and Academy Professor at The Ohio State University. He has also been a visiting professor at Sapienza University in Rome, the University of Bergen in Norway, and the Free University of Amsterdam, and a Research Fellow in Residence at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published over 450 research papers and is one of the world’s leading experts on heart rate variability. Dr. Thayer has received numerous research awards including the Sigma Xi Research Recognition Award, the Early Career Award for Contributions to Psychosomatic Medicine from the American Psychosomatic Society, and distinguished scientist awards from the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, The Society for Psychophysiological Research, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and the American Psychosomatic Society. From 2020 to 2022 he was identified by the Web of Science as a “Highly Cited Researcher”, a designation given to the top 0.1% of researchers. He is on the editorial board of Music and Medicine. Dr. Thayer is also a critically acclaimed musician with numerous recordings and international performances including with Charlie Mariano, Geri Allen, Joey Baron, Tim Ries, John Hicks, Vernon Reid, Scott Robinson, and Pheeroan ak Laff.

Multi-instrumentalist/composer Scott Robinson has been a highly active presence on the New York-based creative music scene for nearly 40 years, appearing on some 275 CDs. Scott performs on both brass and reed instruments, and is equally at home with the traditional and the adventurous. He has been heard on tenor sax with Buck Clayton, on alto clarinet with Paquito D’Rivera, on trumpet with Lionel Hampton, and on bass sax with the New York City Opera, along with performances alongside as diverse a group of artists as Anthony Braxton, Ruby Braff, Ella Fitzgerald, Clark Terry, Elton John, Bob Brookmeyer, Frank Wess, Chet Baker, Maria Schneider and Roscoe Mitchell. In 2001 he performed in eleven West African nations during an 8-week tour as a U.S. Jazz Ambassador. Scott has been the winner of a number of Critics/Readers Polls and Jazz Journalists Association awards in recent years, and has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal, DownBeat magazine, The Encyclopedia of Jazz and many other publications. In 2010, Scott formed ScienSonic Laboratories, an outlet for many exciting and far-reaching projects encompassing what he likes to call “Experiential Music for Adventurous Listeners.” This label has released more than a dozen collaborative efforts with Roscoe Mitchell, Marshall Allen, Henry Grimes, Milford Graves, and many others, as well as “Bronze Nemesis,” Scott’s suite of original compositions based on pulp adventure novels of the 1930s.