Does music matter?

The documentary "The Music Instinct" brings together scientists, scholars and musicians to explore the science of music:

Interested in doing a PhD in Amsterdam?

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) currently has a PhD fellowship available at the Faculty of Science starting on 1 September 2012. Applications are invited from excellent candidates wishing to conduct research in an area in which members of ILLC scientific staff affiliated with the Faculty of Science are active...

For more information, see here. Deadline for applications is 20 May 2012.

Baan in cognitieve muziekwetenschap? [Dutch]

Vorige week kwamen er drie part-time vacatures vrij bij muziekwetenschap Amsterdam. Een daarvan is op het gebied van de cognitieve muziekwetenschap. Deadline voor sollitaties: 31 Maart 2012.

Geïnteresseerd? Voor meer informatie, zie hier.

Working in the humanities, interested in cognition?

Tecumseh Fitch presenting at
SMART on April 20th, 2012

SMART Cognitive Science is an new initiative of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. It embodies lectures, meetings and discussions, offline and online, to highlight the important contributions to cognitive science from traditional humanities disciplines.

SMART is an acronym for Speech and language, Music, Art, Reasoning and Thought. These activities are organized in close collaboration with the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam, in which also the Faculties of Science, Medicine, Social Science and Economics & Econometrics participate.

Some interesting upcoming SMART Cognitive Science Lectures are:

• Tuesday 20/3, 15h30 – 16h, P2.27, Anne Baker (Amsterdam), SMART Perspective on Language and Executive Function; followed from 16h-18h in the same room by a CSCA Lecture by Ianthi Tsimpli (Thessaloniki) on Signed and Spoken Language Asymmetries in a Polyglot-Savant 
• Friday 20/4, 16h-18h, UT3.01, Tecumseh Fitch (Vienna), Cognitive Overlap between Language and Music (see abstract)
• Friday 25/5, 16h-18h, UT3.01, Carel ten Cate (Leiden), On the linguistic abilities of songbirds 
• Friday 22/6, 16h-18h, Doelenzaal, Östen Dahl (Stockholm), How languages get complex 

For more information see here.

How do children learn and represent music?

Jeanne Bamberger

In the eighties of the last century there was an almost utopian vibe that the computer would change not only music, mathematics, linguistics and related fields, but also education. Special programming languages were developed that were aimed to resonate with the intuition of children (and adults) about a certain domain, be it mathematics, music, or language. It generated an enormous amount of ideas, especially at MIT, where for instance Jeanne Bamberger was for long professor of Music and Urban Education. The cognitivist underpinnings of her work marked a groundbreaking shift in the design of music education software, a field dominated at the time by programs influenced by behaviorist “skill and drill” theories of music learning and teaching. Influenced by the work of Seymour Papert on Logo (a lisp-like programming language designed for educational purposes), Jeanne set out to design project-based musical micro-worlds that researchers and teachers could use to help make children’s musical thinking, intuitions, and problem solving processes audible and visible.

Last month the peer-reviewed online journal Visions of Research in Music Education published a tribute to Jeanne Bamberger. See here for more information.

Bamberger, J. (1991/5) The Mind behind the Musical Ear: How Children Develop Musical Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bamberger, J. (2000) Developing Musical Intuitions: A Project-Based Introduction to Making and Understanding Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Desain, P., and Honing, H. (1988). LOCO: A Composition Microworld in Logo. Computer Music Journal, 12 (3), 30-42. DOI: 10.2307/3680334

Honing, H. (1993). A microworld approach to the formalization of musical knowledge Computers and the Humanities, 27 (1), 41-47 DOI: 10.1007/BF01830716

Too old to learn how to play an instrument?

Are musicians born or made? What is the line between skill and talent in any domain, and can we acquire either later in life? Is it possible to learn an instrument at the age of forty? Those are the questions that Gary Marcus explores in Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning:

'If critical periods aren't quite so firm as people once believed, a world of possibility emerges for the many adults who harbor secret dreams—whether to learn a language, to become a pastry chef, or to pilot a small plane. And quests like these, no matter how quixotic they may seem, and whether they succeed in the end or not, could bring unanticipated benefits, not just for their ultimate goals but of the journey itself. Exercising our brains helps maintain them, by preserving plasticity (the capacity of the nervous system to learn new thing), warding off degeneration, and literally keeping the blood flowing. Beyond the potential benefits for our brains, there are benefits for our emotional well-being, too. There may be no better way to achieve lasting happiness—as opposed to mere fleeting pleasure—than pursuing a goal that helps us broaden our horizons.'

Marcus, G. (2012) Guitar Zero. The New Musician and the Science of Learning. New York: Penguin.

What is the relation between language and cognition?

What is the relation between language and cognition? On the one hand, researchers like Noam Chomsky thought of language as an independent function with its own rules. However, other people – mainly psychologists – thought that language as a system is embedded in cognition and subject to all models of cognition. How do researchers currently view the relation between language and cognition? Have new techniques for brain research and research on cognitive functions led to a great change in this regard?

Here* you can find a recording of a recent debate that was held at the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam with a panel consisting of Rens Bod, Annette de Groot, Jeannette Schaeffer, and Hedde Zeijlstra all working at the University of Amsterdam.

Interestingly, music showed up several times in the discussion as well.

* UvA streaming video; Sorry, only visible for UvA-students and employees.

Hauser MD, Chomsky N, & Fitch WT (2002). The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science (New York, N.Y.), 298 (5598), 1569-79 PMID: 12446899

Does performance matter?

Empirical musicology grew out of a desire to ground theories on empirical observation and to construct theories on the basis of the analysis and interpretation of such observations. The arrival of new technologies, most notably that of MIDI and of the personal computer, were instrumental to the considerable increase in the number of empirically oriented investigations into music.

David Huron (1999; 2006) referred to this reorientation as “new empiricism” and considers it, along with “new musicology,” the most influential movement in recent music scholarship. However, the question remains in how far musicology as a whole has been influenced by this new empiricism.

One of the challenges of empirical musicology is still to discuss how systematic and empirical methods can contribute to a further and more precise understanding of musical phenomena, as well as showing how this understanding could have an effect on musicological discourse.

Below a tongue-in-cheek example of how a single score can give rise to an enormous variety of intriguing performances.



 
Huron, D. (2006). Review of Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, and: Statistics in Musicology. Notes, 63 (1), 93-95 DOI: 10.1353/not.2006.0101
Honing, H. (2006). On the growing role of observation, formalization and experimental method in musicology. Empirical Musicology Review, 1(1), 2-5. EMR000002a.pdf

Do musicians listen better?

Today, Makiko Sadakata (Donders Center, Nijmegen) gave a presentation at our monthly meeting on music cognition and computational musicology [1]. She presented a study in which the question was whether musicians do better in perceiving pitch, duration or other timbral deviations in their own and/or unfamiliar languages.

A striking example was the difference in pronunciation between the Japanese words ‘kanyo’ and ‘kannyo’. To my ears, and most of the audience, identical. However, to Japanese ears two very different meanings.

Using discrimination and identification tasks, Sadakata investigated in how far musicians do better in picking up these nuances. It turns out that in some, specific situations musicians indeed do better than non-musicians.

I personally got very interested in the idea in how far ‘listening mode’, i.e. listening to the sound as if it is ‘language’ or ‘music’, might actually explain these differences. Are the differences a result of musicians attending to the sound (e.g., the intonation or timing pattern) instead of to the semantics, the meaning of the linguistic utterance? Future research will tell…

Sadakata, M., and Sekiyama, K. (2011). Enhanced perception of various linguistic features by musicians: A cross-linguistic study Acta Psychologica, 138 (1), 1-10 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.03.007

Is a silence always a silence?

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis of the University of Arkansas discusses in a spoken column at Inside Higher Ed why musical silence is just as important to a composition as the notes themselves:



The last sentence of the column is "If music moves you, the next time someone asks if you know anything about it, think twice before you say 'no' ". Couldn't agree more.