Managing your talents?

Keynote by Dan Levitin

On August 29 and 30, 2013 the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam, and VU University will organize the Managing Your Talents conference. This conference makes for a unique gathering of people whose expertise will be called upon to achieve a new standard of educational excellence in the performing arts. It is a must-go for those who are involved with music, dance or theatre, and who seek to share their interest with researchers from a broad range of disciplines, such as performing arts pedagogy, medicine, neuropsychology, brain and cognition sciences, and human motion sciences.

The keynote lecture will be given by Daniel Levitin (professor of psychology and behavioural neuroscience, McGill University, Montréal), Other speakers at this conference include Eckart Altenmüller (music and medicine), Roger Kneebone (surgical education), Erik Scherder (neuropsychology), Susan Hallam (music psychology and education), and Jacques van Rossum (human motion sciences). The participants will also see examples of teaching and training practices at professional art schools.

Roger Kneebone at TEDMEDLive

Updates on the program will follow at intervals this summer, and will be made available at the conference website: Managing Your Talents. 

(Zie Folia voor een aankondiging in het Nederlands.)

What’s happening in the field music cognition?

The biennial meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) will be held from 8-11 August 2013 at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. This years edition looks like it will be one of the largest if not the largest meetings of SMPC to date.*

If you want to have a look at the program with four parallel tracks and an impressive poster program, the website now hosts a beautiful designed booklet (by Lisa Liskovoi) with an overview of all the papers and posters that will be presented across four days. Download it here.

If you are interested in a lively report during the conference: Vicky Williamson, who you might remember from her blog at ICMPC12, announced to be the blogger of the SMPC as well. Quite a task! Follow it here.

*The organizers were prompted to put it in precise numbers: "The 191 scheduled talks this year represents roughly double the historical norm of roughly 95 (based on metrics from the past 3 meetings). The posters story is similar– 94 here relative to an average of about 60 previously.  We also have a special symposium on music therapy, which I think will be a great addition, as it will help to strengthen our ties with this important research discipline.  This also explains why we had to go with a 4 track structure and 3 posters sessions, which are a lot based on our historical norms."