Keynote Speakers
Prof Laurel Trainor
Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour - McMaster University - Hamilton, Canada
Laurel Trainor is a Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour at McMaster University, a Research Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and a McMaster Distinguished University Professor. She directs the Auditory Development Lab and has published over 160 articles in journals including Science and Nature on the neuroscience of auditory development and the perception of music, including work on pitch, tonality, timing, rhythm, neuroplasticity, and the role of music in social interaction and developmental disorders. She co-holds a patent for the Neuro-compensator hearing aid. She is also the founding and present director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind (MIMM), which houses the LIVELab, a unique research-concert hall with high acoustic control, that is equipped with multi-person motion capture and EEG for studying how performers and audiences interact, and how music can be used to promote health and well-being. Laurel also has a Bachelor of Music Performance from the University of Toronto, enjoys chamber music and is principal flutist of the Burlington Symphony Orchestra.
"Feeling the beat early in development: From neural encoding to social interaction"
Keynote Abstract: Rhythms are ubiquitous in biological systems, from motor movements for locomotion to communication signals such as speech and music. I will present evidence that auditory-motor interactions for timing are present early in development and that the human auditory system uses the motor system to accomplish rhythmic timing. I will present data indicating that infants can maintain internal interpretations of ambiguous rhythm patterns and that even the premature infant brain encodes beat and meter frequencies. Finally, I will discuss the social implications of coordinated movements, showing that infants increase their prosocial helping behaviours towards adults who move in synchrony with them to music, but do not do so for adults who move out-of-sync with them. These studies suggest that rhythms structure experience from very early in development.
Thursday 19th October 2023 at 2 pm (GMT +1 / BST)
Dr Maiko Kawabata
Royal College of Music & Open University - London, UK
Dr. Maiko Kawabata is Reader in Music at Royal College of Music and Staff Tutor in Music at the Open University. She is an award-winning musicologist and professional violinist. She is the author of Paganini, the 'Demonic' Virtuoso and a co-editor of Exploring Virtuosities: Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, Nineteenth-Century Musical Practices and Beyond. Her research interests include performance history, performance studies, gender studies, music and race. Maiko’s research into Japanese composer Kikuko Kanai is supported by the BBC and AHRC. She has played violin in orchestras and chamber ensembles throughout the UK, USA, and Germany.
"Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Performance of Western Classical Music"
Abstract: Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives have recently been prioritised on the agendas of UK music institutions and beyond, but exactly how equal, diverse and inclusive are the practices underlying the professional performance of Western classical music? In this keynote talk, I outline my vision for the changes that urgently need to be made if this field is to become fairer – by drawing on both my own lived experience as a professional violinist and on my research into the structures underlying orchestral culture, published in the forward-looking volume Voices for Change (ed. Bull, Scharff and Nooshin 2023). Here I contextualise my perspective in relation to new critiques of diversity initiatives in music specifically and of racism and coloniality in music more broadly. I also share the ongoing aims of ‘Cultural Imperialism and the New “Yellow Peril” in Western Classical Music’, the project I co-founded with Shzr Ee Tan in 2019. Any meaningful engagement with EDI, in my view, is built on a deep understanding of how exclusions happen in the first place, and grows through the collaborative work of collective learning and activism.
Friday 20th October 2023 at 1:45 pm (GMT +1 / BST)
Dr Julian Cespedes Guevara
Department of Psychological Studies, Icesi University - Cali, Colombia
Julian is an assistant professor, and director of the Psychology undergraduate programme at Universidad Icesi (Colombia). He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia), and a master’s and a doctoral degree in Psychology of Music from the University of Sheffield (United Kingdom). He has taught music psychology topics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at several universities in the UK and Colombia. Julian has dedicated his research to the study of musical emotions, and has proposed a novel constructionist theory to explain how music induces emotions in listeners. He has also investigated the effects of musical training on the development of empathy and prosocial behaviours in children who attend music-based social intervention programmes in Colombia. Julian has published his work in academic journals and presented his work in international conferences.
"Do we need a new theory to explain how music evokes emotions? A constructionist proposal”
Abstract: The scientific study of the way music evokes emotions in listeners has flourished in recent decades, thanks to the development of theories such as the BRECVEMA framework. However, those theories have produced little empirical evidence to test their hypotheses, and they have important limitations: they neglect the symbolic dimension of music, they do not clarify how the mechanisms they propose interact with each other, and they provide few details about how listening contexts influence listeners' emotional experiences. The purpose of my presentation is to put forward an alternative theoretical approach that aims to overcome these limitations, based on contemporary constructivist theories on emotion. The theory I propose submits that when listening to music, perceptual processes are produced that induce changes in central affect and bodily sensations in listeners. At the same time, these perceptual processes cause people to recall conceptual information about their past experiences and about the cultural significance of music. On some occasions, listeners significantly associate changes in their core affect and bodily sensations with the conceptual information evoked by the music and with information about the current context, resulting in the emergence of varied emotional experiences with the music. During my talk, I will present some hypotheses derived from this novel theoretical model and will review recent empirical evidence that supports them.
Wednesday 18th October 2023 at 9:30 am (GMT +1 / BST)