Welcome to Edinburgh, Shannon Proksch! Shannon is a current MSc student on the Mind, Language, and Embodied Cognition programme at Edinburgh, with a research interest in the relationship between music and language as situated communicative acts.
Shannon suggested a reading group theme for the semester, on music in the predictive brain… We’ll meet every fourth Thursday, 1-2pm, starting February 2nd, in Room 1.21, 7 Bristo Square. Let’s go!
Visit the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development (IMHSD) site to read about Tuomas’ seminar, and keep up to date with ongoing IMHSD talks and events!
The Thursday reading group will be back on in the new year – meanwhile, Nikki has been on sabbatical. Here’s what she has been up to:
“I’ve spent some time in Durham as part of my Visiting Fellowship for the new AHRC-funded Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance project, working with Kelly Jakubowski (in a new post-doc role after her work on ear-worms…), Martin Clayton, Tuomas Eerola and Simone Tarsitani. One early output from this work is a jointly-authored conference paper, accepted for presentation in Ghent, Belgium later this year at ESCOM: ‘Measuring Visual Aspects of Interpersonal Interactions in Jazz Duos: A Comparison of Computational vs. Manual Annotation Methods’.
The Fellowship at Durham came out of an earlier project, for which I created a database of audio and motion-captured recordings. These featured pairs of musicians improvising together. Following the original experiments that we carried out using these recordings, other people have taken an interest in this database. So I’ve continued to explore and process the original recordings to make them as useful as possible for other people’s research projects. It’s hard to describe exactly what this entails, but if you have spent any time editing or working with digital media and data in different formats, and if you’ve ever played a locked-room game then you will have an idea how about 100 hours of my sabbatical were spent…
Another large portion of my time went on preparing a new research project proposal. I am interested in the impact that scientific discourse around music – coming from music psychology, music neuroscience, music cognition – has on wider understandings of music within scholarship, education and the public sphere of arts and culture. Still working on this. There’s no single way to carry out a research project. I still have decisions to make about the best methodology for the job.
Alongside these tasks, I did the things that I would normally do (alongside the teaching and admin roles that a research sabbatical relieves) — I peer-reviewed other people’s journal articles, I completed the revisions on a book chapter for a Routledge text book, I drafted the first version of a new article, and I carried out my external examiner roles for programmes at Sheffield and Newcastle Universities, plus a PhD viva at Cambridge.
And I made my first ever trip to Hull, to give one of the Music department’s Newland Lectures. What a city – I mean it! It’s not somewhere that always gets a good press, but I loved it! That place has character and I thought it was beautiful.
So there you go, what I did on my sabbatical – in case you were interested.”
This year has quiet for music psychology reading group meetings, but busy with many other things!
Our one-day Musician movement: capture and analysis symposium – read a short report here – led to various new links and possible collaborations locally and with our colleague, Donald Glowinski, at the University of Geneva. Nikki also began her two-year Visiting Fellowship as part of a new AHRC-funded project based at Durham University, led by Prof. Martin Clayton.
Of the regular EMPRes attendees, Dr Lauren Hadley has now graduated, as has Dr Ana Almeida; alongside writing up his PhD, Alec Cooper has been teaching half of Edinburgh to play the sitar and is about to return to India for another visit to his guru. Yu Fen is in the process of analysing the fascinating kinematic data of ensemble conductors which she collected down the road, in the motion capture facility at the Institute for Sport, Physical Education and Health Sciences.
Some interesting new, regular groups around ECA have taken off in the past year, including the Disability Research Edinburgh group, and the Monday lunchtime Music and Philosophy reading group, led by Dr Benedict Taylor. The Philosophy, Psychology, and Informatics Reading Group (PPIG) also continues to meet fortnightly on Wednesdays to discuss new research in the cognitive sciences.
Looking forward to 2016-17!
Congratulations to PhD student, Yu Fen for her SEMPRE award to travel to SysMus and the satellite MoCap workshop in Jyvaskyla, Finland – and also for her well-received conference paper presentation at ICMPC14, in San Francisco! Read the report on the ECA website here.
Looking forward to catching up with Edinburgh music psychology research activity this summer! New PhD students, news from existing students, new plans, converging topics, and a few outputs to report!
– This review article by Nikki, on why she’s pleased that more music cognition research now focuses on how musicians play together in groups — plus why she thinks there are still some misconceptions afoot in psychological research on music performance. Published in the open access journal, Frontiers in Psychology in the research topic Performance Science.
– An article currently in press for the journal, Psychomusicology: Music, Mind and Brain, based on (newly-)Dr Kirsteen Davidson-Kelly’s doctoral research, on pianists’ use of multimodal imagery to learn new repertoire and prepare for performance. Keep an eye on the Psychomusicology RSS feed (in the side bar over there –> ) for Davidson-Kelly, Schaeffer, Moran & Overy, ‘“Total Inner Memory”: Deliberate Uses of Multimodal Musical Imagery During Performance Preparation.’
– A multimedia dataset from the Improvising Duos project (Moran & Keller, 2015) is now accessible through the Edinburgh DataShare service – follow this link to watch our 10s animations of motion-captured musician duos!
– … and here are our findings from the original Improvising Duos study, published in the open access journal, PLoS ONE: Moran, Hadley, Bader & Keller (2015).
The Joint Action Reading Group (JARG) is based in Psychology — this week they will be discussing a paper that deals with the mutual timing mechanisms required by ensemble musicians.
Thursday, 26th March, at 5:00PM in room S38 (second floor, 7 George Square). Make a request and Alessia and Alex will add you to their mailing list to hear about future meetings.
EMPRes fortnightly reading group meetings are going on hold for a while, until Nikki comes back from maternity leave, and after Lauren gets back from Australia where she’s enjoying a stint at the MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney with the Music Cognition and Action group.
Each summer, the international community of music psychology researchers get together for an increasingly massive show-and-tell. This August it’s the turn of the joint ICMPC (International conference on music perception and cognition) and APSCOM (Asia-Pacific Society for Cognitive Sciences of Music), to host a conference in Seoul, Korea from 4-8 August.
And guess who’s going? We’re very proud of our own Lauren Victoria Hadley for winning the Young Researcher prize! Lauren’s paper, The Effects of Anomaly on Music Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements, will be presented in one of the two Young Researcher award plenary sessions.
Check out the programme to find more IMHSD names, including Raymond MacDonald, Nikki Moran, Jill Morgan, Sujin Hong, Kirsteen Davidson-Kelly, Katie Overy and others!
Eric wrote:
The goal would be to make everyone happy and confident that whatever
data they want to analyse, they can bring it into Matlab and
manipulate it easily: load it, view it or play it, plot the aspects of
it they want to visualise, and save it. I think that what discourages
most people are getting hung up on small details, i.e. feeling like
they need to look up every little step on the internet each time they
open the program. So we practice these with a series of data sets
until everyone feels like getting data into Matlab and playing with it
is 1-2-3.
Thanks, Eric!
Psychology of Music – Online First Music Perception – current issue Psychomusicology RSS feed