Can't get it out of your head?

Imagine listening to a catchy tune. When do you nod your head and sing along? That's the hook, the most memorable part of the song, crafted by songwriters to stick in your head and exploited by DJs to get people onto the dance floor. Everyone knows a hook when they hear it, but scientists don't know why.

#Hooked was launched this week at Manchester Science Festival and will run until September 2014. During the Festival people can contribute their catchiest songs and stories to build the playlist and scientists will debate the science of what makes music catchy, from hooks, to earworms and hit songs. There will be a silent disco and shows about music with ‘Captain Hooked’ (see website for more details). Nominations for the playlist (which runs across all musical genres) will continue in the run up to the launch of the #Hooked game in early 2014.



#Hooked is an ambitious initiative of Dr Erinma Ochu, funded by a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowship. She did an amazing job in bringing lots of people together as well as initiating a series of activities at the Manchester Science Museum around the simple idea of finding out what makes music catchy, an idea with a potential outreach far beyond that of basic music cognition research. The hooked-game will be launched in the Spring of 2014. And, if you can't wait, you can do the Hooked questionaire here or nominate your favorite song here.

Why does this matter? Well, the experiment is all about musical memory and as such might provide insights into long term memory and even failing memory, which could contribute to future Alzheimer's disease research. See video below for further motivation:



Click here to Participate!

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."

Interested in music gaming and software development?

We are looking for a researcher with experience in iOS development who can help us explore the question of 'what makes music catchy?' with an innovative music quiz game. For more information and detailed instructions on how to apply see here. Deadline for applications is 15 August 2013.

Burgoyne, J. A., Bountouridis. D., Balen, J. van, & Honing, H. (in press). Hooked: A game for discovering what makes music catchy. Proceedings of ISMIR. Curitiba, Brasil.

In for a discount?

I hope you don't mind that -in the middle of the summer- I do another plug of my book that is about to appear in paperback and offered at 50% discount until Thursday 18 July 2013.

However, from now on, be sure to expect mostly updates on research by colleagues. As a start, below a reference to an intriguing paper by Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson that just came out in Frontiers in Language Sciences on the evolutionary history of language, with a single, yet inspiring paragraph on music.

Dediu, D. & Levinson, S.C.  (2013) On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences. Frontiers in Language Sciences. 4, 397.

What's new on music, language and the brain?

From 8-12 May 2011 about forty researchers were asked to join a week of discussions in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in the context of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum.

The Forum can best be imagined as an intellectual retreat. A group of international experts are brought together for a week to identify gaps in knowledge; key questions are posed and innovative ways of filling these gaps are sought. To complete the communication process, the Ernst Strüngmann Forum publishes the results in partnership with MIT Press.

The 2011 Forum explored the relationships between language, music, and the brain by pursuing four key themes and the crosstalk among them: 1) song and dance as a bridge between music and language, 2) multiple levels of structure from brain to behavior to culture, 3) the semantics of internal and external worlds and the role of emotion, and 4) the evolution and development of language.

See more information on the resulting book at MIT Press.

Interested in becoming a student assistant at MCG?

 

The Music Cognition Group (MCG) searches for an enthusiastic and well-organized personal assistant (PA) for the Academic Year 2013/14. For more information and detailed instructions on how to apply see here. Deadline for applications is 01 July 2013.

Does music make you move?

At TEDxWaterloo 2013 Jessica Grahn – a cognitive neuroscientist working at Western University, Canada – presented an engaging talk about why music moves us, and why picking up the beat might make us unique.




And another video just to ilustrate the point:



N.B. See below some of the studies mentioned in the talk.

Grahn, J., & Brett, M. (2007). Rhythm and Beat Perception in Motor Areas of the Brain Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19 (5), 893-906 DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2007.19.5.893

Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038

Zarco, W., Merchant, H., Prado, L., & Mendez, J. (2009). Subsecond Timing in Primates: Comparison of Interval Production Between Human Subjects and Rhesus Monkeys Journal of Neurophysiology, 102 (6), 3191-3202 DOI: 10.1152/jn.00066.2009

'Vocal mimicry hypothesis' falsified? [Part 2]

Figure (a) Ai tapped C4, (b) Ai tapped C5, (c) Time sequence of a test trial.

A few entries ago I uploaded a fragment from a study (Hattori et al., 2013) that discusses an intriguing experiment with three chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) which were trained to tap regularly on a piano keyboard.

While the video below is convincing, the study reports that only one of the three chimps participating in the experiment was able to do the task: a chimp named Ai (See video).  Furthermore, Ai was only able to synchronize with stimuli at a rate of 600 ms (and not at rates of 400 or 500 ms). In addition, Ai did this in reaction (positive asynchrony) and not in anticipation of the beat (negative asynchrony).

This is similar to what has been found in studies with macaques (Zarco et al., 2009; Konoike et al., 2012) that also seem to opt for a strategy of to react instead of anticipating to a regular beat. All this in contrast with humans that can intentionally synchronize their tapping to various rates (ranging roughly from 200 ms to 1800 ms) of a varying rhythmic stimulus (and not simply a metronome) while showing a negative synchronization error, i.e. in anticipation of the beat.

Another point of a more methodological nature is that the experimentators used, next to sound, what they called 'light navigation' (see diagram above), a visual cue for the chimps to 'remind them' of which key to press. While the authors write "it was unlikely that the visual stimuli affected tapping rhythm by chimpanzees" we can not be sure this is evidence for rhythmic entrainment in the auditory domain.

Nevertheless, with behavioral methods that rely on overt motoric responses it is difficult to separate between the contribution of perception and action (beat perception vs beat production). This makes electrophysiological measures (such as event-related potentials) a more direct and hence attractive alternative. The latter method has been shown a worthwhile, non-invasive alternative in studying cognitive and neural processing in primates (see, e.g., Ueno et al., 2009) and it was used recently in a study probing beat perception in macaques (Honing, Merchant et al., 2012).*

And lastly, these and earlier observations have lead to the auditory timing dissociation hypothesis (Honing, Merchant et al., 2012). This hypothesis accommodates the fact that nonhuman primates performance is comparable to humans in single interval tasks (such as interval reproduction, categorization and interception), but differs substantively in multiple interval tasks (such as rhythmic entrainment, synchronization and continuation).

* N.B. We are eager to collaborate with a primate lab that is willing to do such a relatively simple listening experiment using EEG with chimpanzees; Would be great to compare the results we now have for human adults, newborns, and macaques with the perception of Great Apes ! Feel free to email me :-)

Hattori, Y., Tomonaga, M., & Matsuzawa, T. (2013). Spontaneous synchronized tapping to an auditory rhythm in a chimpanzee. Scientific Reports, 3 DOI: 10.1038/srep01566.

Hasegawa, A., Okanoya, K., Hasegawa, T., & Seki, Y. (2011). Rhythmic synchronization tapping to an audio–visual metronome in budgerigars Scientific Reports, 1 DOI: 10.1038/srep00120

Honing, H., Merchant, H., Háden, G., Prado, L., & Bartolo, R. (2012). Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) detect rhythmic groups in music, but not the beat. PLoS ONE, 7 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0051369

Thrirty-two metronomes synchronizing?

If you place 32 metronomes on a static object and set them rocking out of phase with one another, they will remain that way indefinitely. Place them on a moveable surface, however, and something very interesting happens (dedicated to Christiaan Huygens):



For more 'variations' see the Ikeguchi Lab, Japan.