About NeuroPop

NeuroPop was founded in 2000 by Seth Horowitz and Lance Massey.  At the time, music and sound were treated largely as accessories for media.  This is because sound is rarely what you pay attention to - it is what drives your attention to other things.  We recognized this and realized that sound provides both the basis and the context for almost every emotional and attention-based behavior.  We created NeuroPop to take laboratory and clinical findings from the laboratory and bring them to the real worlds of multimedia, music, science, education, healthcare and branding.  NeuroPop knows the math behind the mind - and applies it.

Seth S. Horowitz, Ph.D. - Chief Scientist 

Seth Horowitz, Ph.D. is an Assistant Research professor in the departments of neuroscience and psychology at Brown University and is the Chief Scientist of NeuroPop, one of the first sound design firms to base their work on neural and psychophysical principles.  Throughout the 1980s, he worked as a gigging R&B and electronic musician and animator.  In the late eighties, after reading about research with animal communication, he began working with dolphins and built the first musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) enabled underwater keyboard, which was sadly not as salt water-proof as was hoped.  He returned to school to study auditory development, eventually obtaining his Masters in Psychology and subsequently a Ph.D. from Brown in Human Neuroscience, his dissertation published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.  He continued his scientific work at Stony Brook and Brown in hearing, balance and sleep research funded by grants from the National Institutes of health, DARPA, The Deafness Foundation, and NASA.  He has published numerous academic papers in such journals as Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the Journal of Neuroscience and the Journal of Comparative Neurology.  He has taught undergraduate and graduate level classes in animal behavior, neuroethology, brain development, the biology of hearing, and the musical mind.  He is a member of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories educational outreach group, the Solar System Ambassadors, speaking and presenting interactive classes at schools from elementary to high school level about the human side of science and technology.  He has also been an invited speaker at science and science fiction conferences, speaking about such weird topics as sound in space, and the design of alien senses.

 Lance T. Massey - Creative Director

After graduating from Oberlin Conservatory, Lance started his career in the early 1980's as one of the first composers to apply algorithmic compositional techniques to commercial music production. During his 20+ year career, Lance's music provided the sound track for some of the world's most recognized brands including McDonalds, Pepsi, Toyota, IT&T, Diet Coke, and most visibly with his composing the T-Mobile ring tone (for which he was "honored" in Maxim magazine's 100th issue).

Lance has also composed the music for the spoken word opera "Blue Gods" and NeuroPop's ground breaking "Overload" CD, created the world's first commercially viable audio morphing program, and produced and worked with artists such as Julee Cruise, Kit McClure, Talia Paul, Richard X. Heyman, Jesse Malin and Masabumi Kikuchi.