Music
Music
Singer-songwriter. Album, performance, and research on the music–cognition–pedagogy intersection.
I write and perform songs in English, French, and Arabic. My album How it Began was released in 2021. Music is not separate from my intellectual work — it is one of the practices through which the questions I work on become real to me.
How it Began (2021)
My debut album. A collection of songs written across the years of my doctoral studies, recorded and released in 2021.
The album is available on the major streaming platforms. For performance inquiries, recording collaborations, or the use of the music in educational and documentary contexts, please write to mariam.dahbi@um6p.ma.
Music as research, music as practice
There is a research thread that runs alongside the music — on the neural and developmental overlap between musical training and language processing, and on what musical practice has to teach about the kind of attention learning requires. I have presented and written on this intersection in a number of forms.
The Pedagogy of Collective Songwriting project (with 88International, Erina Iwasaki at Notre Dame, and Eric Petzoldt) is one of the empirical lines in my research program — a research-practice partnership examining collective songwriting as a pedagogical and developmental practice in multilingual contexts. See the Research page for more.
I have also worked, through JCI Morocco’s Education Harmony Morocco initiative, on a sequence of writings and presentations on music and education — toward an eventual book titled Harmony in Education: Reimagining the Future of Learning in Morocco.
On registers
My academic colleagues sometimes ask, gently, whether the music is a hobby. It is not. Nor is it subordinated to the intellectual work — performance and recording practice are independently mine. The music and the scholarship are two registers of one intellectual life: each one teaches me something the other could not. I keep them visible to each other on this site for that reason.