Interested in an Assistent Professorship in the Cognitive Sciences?

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is a research institute at the University of Amsterdam in which researchers from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities collaborate. Its central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. Research at ILLC is interdisciplinary, and aims at bringing together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, mathematics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, music cognition and musicology.

Deadline: 4 November 2016.

See for more information here.

Join the 2017 real-time beat tracking competition?

Foot-tapping shoe competition at the 1994 ICMC in Aarhus, Denmark.

In 1994 we organized at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) a foot-tapping competition on the computational modeling of beat perception.  Several researchers had their latest models control a mechanical shoe, while listening to a variety of national anthems. (See the Dutch Clog in action in the picture above, and below the original prototype.)

At an upcoming IEEE conference a similar challenge will be held. I'm quite exited about that. It is intriguing to see that a skill that is apparently so trivial for humans continues to be a challenge for machines (cf. Honing, 2013).

A prototype tapping in the P.C.Hoofthuis at the
University of Amsterdam in 1993.

The goal of the IEEE challenge is to implement a real-time beat tracker on an embedded platform and to demonstrate the performance with a creative output such as, but not limited to, drumming, dancing, or flickering lights. It is challenging to perform beat tracking in real time because the complete signal is not available. It is also challenging because there can be a wide variety of musical input and the system needs to perform well on all of them. For more information on why beat perception / beat tracking is interesting, see Dan Levitin's This is your brain on music, cited in the IEEE Cup Challenge document.

Important Dates: November 7, 2016 - Registration Deadline
March 5-9, 2017 - Final Competition at ICASSP 2017

Detailed information can be found here.

Honing, H. (2013) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4228-0.

Wat is het nut van een afgekeurd onderzoeksvoorstel? [Dutch]

Illustratie: Marc Kolle

"Schrijven van onderzoeksvoorstellen kost te veel tijd” kopte het NRC Handelsblad afgelopen week naar aanleiding van het verschijnen van de resultaten van een enquête van het wetenschappelijk bureau van de SP. Een meerderheid van de bevraagde wetenschappers blijkt zo’n twintig procent van de werktijd aan het schrijven van onderzoeksvoorstellen te besteden, met, zo wordt gemeld, weinig kans van slagen. Zonde van de tijd, lieten veel respondenten weten.

Onzin natuurlijk. Volgende week in Folia Magazine een reactie...

Want to join MCG in Amsterdam with a research fellowship?

The European Commission and the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) offers several fellowship opportunities for young researchers. See website for more information.

Interested in a PhD position at the UvA?

Recently new funds have been made available to the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Humanities through the so-called Sustainable Humanities programme (Duurzame Geesteswetenschappen). The faculty has decided to dedicate part of the funds to creating five new PhD positions (4 years, 0.8 fte each).

Previous contact with the Faculty of Humanities or possible supervisors is not necessary. International researchers are also encouraged to apply. Proposed projects must be relevant to one of the research schools within AIHR or to ILLC (in the case of music cognition related proposals).

Applications should include a description of the proposed research project (max. 2500 words, written in English), a full academic CV, and a list of MA/MSc grades (see link below for more information). Applicants must have a completed Master’s degree in a relevant field before the start date of the fellowship.

See website for more information.

N.B. The deadline for applications is 15 August 2016

Update 22 August:The faculty received 600 applications. Applicants will be informed on the outcome before October 1st.

Another one bites the dust?

A Tsimane' man plays the flute (from: McDermott et al., 2016).

The music theory literature has been suggesting it for a long time: the idea that simultaneously sounding tones with frequency relationships that are low integer multiples, like 1:2 (octave) or 3:2 (a perfect fifth), are determinant of how listeners perceive consonance. It is an idea that is often related to the overtone structure of natural sounds (such as the voice or string instruments) suggesting that musical harmony is reflective or even a result of the acoustic structure that is found in natural, harmonic sounds that are surrounding us (see earlier entries).

However, a study that was published in Nature today, makes both ideas quite unlikely (McDermott et al., 2016). The authors conclude that "consonance preferences are unlikely to be innate, and that they are not driven by exposure to harmonic natural sounds such as vocalizations." Instead, consonance preferences seem to depend on exposure to particular types of music, presumably those that feature consonant harmony. In an elegantly controlled study McDermott and colleagues compared the perception of musical, speech and natural sounds in North American listeners (both musicians and non-musicians) and compared them to two groups of Bolivian listeners, of which one group rarely is in contact with Western culture, a tribe named Tsimane' (Chimane).

All participants rated the pleasantness of sounds. Despite exhibiting Western-like discrimination abilities and Western-like aesthetic responses to familiar sounds and acoustic roughness, the Tsimane’ rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant. By contrast, Bolivian city- and town-dwellers exhibited significant preferences for consonance, albeit to a lesser degree than North American listeners. The results indicate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music, and are thus unlikely to reflect innate biases or exposure to harmonic natural sounds. It seems we can remove 'consonance perception' from our list of candidate constituent elements that might underlie the human predisposition for music, i.e. musicality (see Honing et al., 2015).

UPDATE: Related news article in Dutch.

McDermott, J. H., Schultz, A. F., Undurraga, E. A., & Godoy, R. A. (2016). Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature, 525, 7611. DOI: 10.1038/nature18635.

Honing, H., ten Cate, C., Peretz, I., & Trehub, S. (2015). Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140088-20140088 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0088

Can humans listen like songbirds do?

European Starling © www.allaboutbirds.org

Humans and songbirds share many interesting similarities with regard to their auditory processing capabilities. For example, we know that humans and European Starlings have similar frequency sensitivity, perceive the pitch of the missing fundamental, and parse multiple pure-tone sequences into separate auditory streams. At higher levels, the “musical” nature of birdsong has long been appreciated by humans, and some songbirds can readily learn to discriminate and imitate human melodic sequences (cf. Hoeschele et al., 2015).

Given these similarities, it is surprising to find a major difference in how humans and songbirds perceive sequences of tones. Humans readily recognize tone sequences that are shifted up or down in log frequency because the pattern of relative pitches is maintained (referred to as relative pitch). In contrast, songbirds appear to have a strong bias to rely on absolute pitch for the recognition of tone sequences (a pitch-shifted melody might well be perceived as an altogether different melody; Hoeschele et al., 2015).

Interestingly, a recent study by Bregman et al. (2016), contrasting pitch and spectral patterns, shows that birds perceive their song more like humans perceive speech (Shannon, 2016). More precisely, songbirds might attend more to the acoustic spectral shape than to the absolute pitch of the acoustic signal. Stimuli that preserve acoustic spectral shape, even in the absence of pitch, seem to allow for generalization of learned acoustic patterns. Hence it could well be that a sensitivity to spectral shape is what is shared between human and avian cognition of musical signals, while relative pitch is the preferred mode of listening for humans. And one could wonder: why is sound "super normally stimulated" in humans (see earlier entry), and can humans be made to change their listening mode in the direction of birds (or vice versa) when manipulating melody and spectral shape?

Bregman, M., Patel, A., & Gentner, T. (2016). Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113 (6), 1666-1671 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1515380113

Hoeschele, M., Merchant, H., Kikuchi, Y., Hattori, Y., & ten Cate, C. (2015). Searching for the origins of musicality across species Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140094-20140094 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0094

Shannon, R. V. (2016). Is Birdsong More Like Speech or Music? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (4), 245-247 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2016.02.004

Interested in a PhD position at the University of Amsterdam?

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) currently has two PhD positions available at the Faculty of Science starting on 1 September 2016 (or as soon after that as possible). Applications are now invited from excellent candidates wishing to conduct research in an area within ILLC (i.e. mathematics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, musicology and/or cognitive science) that fits naturally in the Faculty of Science. See website for more information.

N.B. The deadline for applications is 15 May 2016

De juiste toon: had Pythagoras gelijk? [Dutch]

In muziek zijn vele wiskundige en natuurkundige wetten te vinden. Liggen die patronen aan de basis van wat we mooi vinden? Hebben onze hersenen een voorkeur voor bepaalde patronen? En hoe zit het met andere culturen, die weer andere patronen waarderen?

Over al deze zaken werd er stevig gediscussieerd tijdens de BètaBreak van 18 november j.l. met Michiel Schuijer (Muziektheoreticus, lector aan Conservatorium van Amsterdam), Henkjan Honing (hoogleraar Muziekcognitie aan de UvA) en Jan van de Craats (hoogleraar Wiskunde aan de UvA). Enkele van de referneties die genoemd worden staan hieronder (Plomp & Levelt, 1965; Savage et al., 2015).



De benadering van muziek als een natuurkundig of wiskundig verschijnsel heeft als mogelijke valkuil om naast geluidsleer een soort getallenleer te worden. Alsof harmonische, mooie of ‘juiste’ muziek door de natuur bepaald of zelfs afgedwongen wordt. Er klinkt iets in terug van het, in steeds wisselende gedaantes terugkerende Oudgriekse idee van een ‘harmonie der sferen’, het idee dat de wiskundige structuur van muziek iets zou kunnen onthullen over de natuur zelf. Of omgekeerd: dat een elegante formule die de code van de muziek van vermaarde componisten (denk aan Bach) weet te kraken en de onderliggende getallenstructuur ervan blootlegt, ons kan laten zien hoe mooi, hoe ‘natuurlijk’ die muziek is. Maar al Pythagoras’ ideeën over consonantie in termen van heeltallige ratio’s ten spijt: een hedendaagse, zorgvuldig maar allesbehalve heeltallig gestemde piano wordt door opvallend weinig mensen als ‘vals’ ervaren. Het is de eeuwenoude tegenstelling tussen muziek opgevat als getal en muziek als empirisch feit (cf. Pythagoras versus Aristoxenus). Muziek huist niet zozeer in het geluid of in het getal, maar eerder in het hoofd van de luisteraar (Honing, 2012).

Honing, H. (2012). Een vertelling. In S. van der Maas, C. Hulshof, & P. Oldenhave (Eds.), Liber Plurum Vocum voor Rokus de Groot (pp. 150-154). Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam (ISBN 978-90-818488-0-0)
Plomp R, & Levelt WJ (1965). Tonal consonance and critical bandwidth. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 38 (4), 548-60 PMID: 5831012
Savage, P., Brown, S., Sakai, E., & Currie, T. (2015). Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112 (29), 8987-8992 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414495112

Does musicality have a biological foundation?

Genes with functions that are relevant to music aptitude such as hearing, cognitive performance and neurodegenerative functions are marked by triangles (From Liu et al., 2016).

A few days ago a study was published by the team of Irma Järvelä (University of Helsinki) on the identification of genetic variants underlying musical ability. They based their new study (Liu et al., 2016) on an existing database of ca. 150 unrelated Finnish subjects that were tested for their musical ability using a collection of pitch and pattern perception tests. In addition, for all participants genomic DNA was available (based on a blood sample). The participants were divided into two groups (low vs high musical aptitude), with the lower scoring individuals functioning as the control group.

The study focused on regions that can be associated with positive selection (Sabeti et al., 2006). Using genomic and bioinformatic techniques, the researchers were able to identify those regions that contain sets of variations in the DNA and show which regions are likely under positive selection.

The regions that were identified contained genes that are involved in auditory perception (e.g. GPR98, USH2A), cognition and memory (e.g. GRIN2B, IL1A, IL1B, RAPGEF5), reward mechanisms (RGS9), and song perception and production of songbirds (e.g. FOXP1, RGS9, GPR98, GRIN2B).

There are, of course, some drawbacks in this study that is largely exploratory. While the study was able to identify positively selected regions, the actual genes involved and their function remains unclear. Musicality is, obviously, a complex trait that likely has many contributing genes, and developing a proper phenomics is still quite a challenge (cf. Gingras et al., 2015). Nevertheless, the study suggests that several genes – that can be argued to be essential for musical aptitude (or musicality at large) – could well be under positive selection. The result hence supports the idea that musicality has a biological foundation that is necessary for the development of musical culture.

Liu, X., Kanduri, C., Oikkonen, J., Karma, K., Raijas, P., Ukkola-Vuoti, L., Teo, Y., & Järvelä, I. (2016). Detecting signatures of positive selection associated with musical aptitude in the human genome Scientific Reports, 6 DOI: 10.1038/srep21198

Sabeti, P. (2006). Positive Natural Selection in the Human Lineage Science, 312 (5780), 1614-1620 DOI: 10.1126/science.112430

Gingras, B., Honing, H., Peretz, I., Trainor, L., & Fisher, S. (2015). Defining the biological bases of individual differences in musicality Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140092-20140092 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0092