Blog

Watch this space! We will publish interesting posts on research, experiences on hosting SysMus, Interviews, and much more in the coming weeks. If you're interested to publish something on our blog, get in touch via email: sysmus.executive@gmail.com

Here you can find SysMus Interviews that have been conducted over the past years.

Effective Academic Posters

Traditionally, poster sessions at academic conferences provide a space for several A0-sized posters to be displayed in a hall while attendees engage with the presenters about the research. In recent years, many poster sessions have been moved to an online format where presenters stand with their posters in a virtual space recreating the environment of a traditional poster session. Many of the same rules apply for posters (presented physical or virtually), and the following blog post describes some best practices for designing academic posters, presenting your research, and engaging with your audience.

What is the point of an academic poster?

Poster presentations should be seen as a way to present your work and interact with other researchers at an academic conference. It is a great medium for graduate students to first present new research findings and connect with peers in a less intimidating format. Usually, poster presentations are granted to those who will be presenting smaller pieces of work and/or have received lower abstract scores to those giving talks at a conference. However, presenting a poster should not necessarily be seen as a lower award for conference presentations. It is often the case that a poster is simply a better medium for conveying your information and should be taken advantage of fully. Only a few minutes can be given for questions and answers at the end of a 20-minute talk, but with a poster, you have the freedom to engage more deeply with those interested in your research, and you have the opportunity to network face-to-face with people in your field. 

Creating the poster

Too often posters are presented as a visual paper, with endless blocks of black text on a white background. The goal of a poster should be to communicate your research effectively through engaging visualisations with a small number of words that accurately and concisely convey the expressed ideas. To achieve this goal, you should take advantage of the poster's greatest strength: visual real estate. Use the poster as a canvas to boldly present the most interesting parts of your research in an eye-catching way. To translate your research into an effective and engaging poster, it may be best to use a template that pre-organises your sections into easily legible and separated areas. Several blank Powerpoint poster files can be found in this blog post.

Poster content should be made with the idea that someone from two metres away can read your poster and easily parse the visual elements. You want to draw people’s interest with the use of colour and figures. Ask yourself if your finding be represented in a visually interesting way and construct your poster around that aspect. To keep the wordcount down, a good rule of thumb is to only use 300–800 words on your entire poster and try to not to have all the words crammed into one section. Bullet points can be more effective than complete sentences, and details of the findings can be articulated verbally with the main points displayed in text. Use the following points to guide your poster creation:

• Use figures, pops of colour, and only one font

• Keep the layout of your poster clean and easily legible

• References can be included in a small section near the bottom (you can always highlight them in your verbal presentation if needed)

• Simplify illustrations to more effectively communicate ideas

• The poster should be self-explanatory, as you want people to grasp the main idea quickly

• Every item that appears on the poster should be important, leave out the trivial details

If you would like some examples, here are a few good posters and posters with room for improvement so you can gauge how the above points apply.

How to present at a poster session

With a poster that follows the guidance above, more people will be able to engage with your research and spend less time wading through unnecessary text. However, that is not all that is important for in a poster session. The first half is the poster, but the other half is your presentation of the material. You should be prepared to give a condensed walkthrough of the research using the poster as a visual aid and explain your work in 5–10 minutes. You should also be prepared to talk through these small presentations several time to multiple groups throughout the length of the session (usually one hour). It is often helpful to practise your presentation before the day you will be presenting to ensure you are able to talk through everything you wish to within the time constraints.  Do note that some people will come prepared to engage with your work, having previously read your abstract, while others may come expecting you to present your work without any knowledge of your topic. After your brief presentation, those in attendance will ask questions, and this is where you’ll be able to engage in a deeper conversation about the material.

Lastly, there are plenty of other helpful tips for #betterposters on social media, and in the last few years there has been a push to reimagine what a poster presentation can (and should) be! Dr Mike Morrison runs a YouTube channel that helps reinvent what posters session can look like for better engagement and memorability at conferences. We hope you have found this advice helpful and wish you all the best with your poster presentations for SysMus23 and future conferences.

Landon Peck - June 2023

Performer or Researcher–Why Not Both? 

Choosing whether to pursue a career in music performance or music research is a decision many of us must make at some point in our studies. As someone who has been doing both, I’m here to say that it can be done, BUT finding the right balance is key. I pursued two bachelor’s degrees, one in general science and one in bassoon performance; I’m currently completing two master’s degrees, one in bassoon performance and one in musicology, as well as a certificate in new media and culture. The following questions are meant to aid you in self-reflection and planning for your career(s).

What aspect of music interests you most?

What is the thing about music that draws you in and fascinates you? What could you talk about for hours on end–the intricacies of performing Mahler’s first symphony, the context surrounding the birth of hip-hop in New York in the 1980s, the way music helps patients with dementia to move and recall, the best way to teach an intermediate player how to play or sing, the genetic predispositions for music perception or production? Often, the “thing” we talk our friends’ ears off about can clue you into what drives you.

What skills do you have, or want to obtain?

In both performance and research, there are necessary skills that require a significant time investment. Practicing and rehearsals alone can easily constitute a full-time job, and learning to use software like R or reading hundreds of pages of literature can do the same. As a bassoonist, I also factor in the temporal and financial resources needed for making reeds. Do you love working with others in rehearsal and the process of refining your performance skills but hate wading through dense academic texts? Or do you prefer the problem-solving, collaboration, and critical thinking involved in research over the daily grind of technique etudes?

Does the type of performance you want to do require a degree(s)? 

If you play the piano and want to professionally accompany performers, having a degree or two as a credential is a good idea. If you specialize in electric bass and want to jam in a rock or metal band, no one will stop you and ask for a diploma. Professional groups typically ask for a resume from auditionees–for those groups, training and experience matters. Even without a degree, you can take lessons with professionals in your area and access opportunities based on your proficiency, networking, and enthusiasm. Generally speaking, obtaining a master’s or doctoral degree in performance puts you on the pathway to becoming an applied faculty for your performance area.

Does the type of research you want to do require a certain type or level of degree?

For research, a degree (or three) is expected and sometimes necessary. The biggest consideration to make for research is from what discipline you want to approach music, which can straddle the sciences, social sciences, and the arts/humanities. I chose musicology rather than a STEM field such as neuroscience because I can still use scientific methods and analysis to help answer humanistic questions. 

There are fantastic labs in all sorts of disciplines all over the world (check out http://www.musicperception.org/smpc-resources.html). Do some research and see who is answering the questions you are interested in (and how they are doing it). Can you answer those questions with a ____ degree? Would you want to someday teach _____ coursework? What are your strengths? Getting in touch with a researcher in each field and asking them what the training entails will also help inform you with this decision.

What resources can you access? How realistic are these paths for you and your specific situation? 

For me, doing the performance degree in my undergraduate studies provided scholarships, so completing a certain degree may be a way to reduce the cost of your education. Generally, graduate assistantships or funding (grants/etc.) exist for both career paths, however, the amount of support given to students in music programs versus social science/science programs varies greatly. Asking graduate students at the institutions you’re interested in attending will reveal those differences. Some schools fund master’s students, some don’t. Keep in mind that performers can begin taking auditions at any point in their training and start private studios. 

Further points to consider: will you need to do a postdoc after your PhD, and will you consider alt-ac jobs? Are you willing to move far away? Do you have a family or a partner who you would like to factor into these decisions? How long can you afford to be in school? What sorts of benefits, especially long-term, would a job in one or the other field provide? What is the longevity of your performance career, and would you consider pivoting after a certain amount of time in either career path?

How might being a performer enrich your research, and vice versa? How can you achieve work-life balance?

Being a music researcher, particularly in the sciences, sometimes involves little to no interaction with music. Involving yourself in music can help inform your research questions. Similarly, research and music analysis can help inform performers about performance practice, context, and reception. Using one activity as a break from the other can be helpful in maintaining work-life balance. Though I’ve loved my performance activities, doing concurrent degrees has led me dangerously close to burnout. I recommend setting boundaries on your time (for example, agreeing to a certain # of concerts a year, or setting aside a certain # of hours a week for lab work). You might take breaks from one or the other depending on your life stage–for example, my advisor cut back on gigging while he worked to obtain tenure, and once tenured, began playing and touring more often. 

Making decisions like these are never easy–taking time to consult close friends, family, and mentors in conjunction with self-reflection will aid in making an informed decision based on your passions, skills, and resources. 

Annie Liu - May 2023

Reflecting on the Executive’s first term

Since the first blog post introduced SysMus’s first Executive and our goals, we thought it would be nice to wrap up our term with some reflections.

When we first formed, one of the first things we had to do was figure out what we wanted to accomplish. There had never been a SysMus Executive, so we talked about how we could best serve the community. We came up with a Strategic Plan that focused on four main areas: academic quality, inclusivity, centralization and community. Some of these aims under the four areas were to: 1) increase reach and inclusivity by having representation from every continent for each conference across submissions, reviewers and presenters (in person or virtually); 2) publish a special issue in a journal featuring work of the SysMus community; 3) set up a pattern of alternate hosting between Europe, North America and Asia Pacific; 4) promote and make connections with other science-based organizations with similar goals; 5) create centralized databases (list of labs, past conference data) and resources (host guide, communication outlets); 6) develop a formal host application process; and 7) engage the SysMus community in new ways, such as this blog.

Sarah, Chair (2018-2020)

As I look back at what our goals were, I’m pleased at how much we’ve achieved. The first thing we did was to move SysMus to a new website and launch this blog, which has featured writings from both members of the Executive and members of the SysMus community. We set to work creating our centralized databases and resources, including a benchmarking system for SysMus conferences tracking things such as number of submissions, number of acceptances/rejections, number of attendees, etc., Executive social media accounts and email, and a hosting guide combining all the hosting experience on the Exec to pass on to new hosts. We’ve also developed a formal host application process and are very excited to see SysMus go to Aarhus next! We’ve maintained our existing partnerships with SEMPRE and ESCOM and have partnered with Empirical Musicology Review to publish a special issue featuring work by participants of SysMus20. While I’m mentioning SysMus20, we’re also very glad that it went ahead as SysMus series’ first all-virtual conference! A fantastic job by Diana Kayser who adapted and organized a great conference!

Now of course, this was forced by the COVID-19 global pandemic, which was totally unprecedented and has of course had and continues to have a deep impact on our everyday lives and society. Moving to a virtual format was an opportunity for continued scholarship and increased inclusion as the cost of participating in such a conference went from thousands of dollars to zero. I know that I attended many events that I otherwise would not have had they not gone virtual so it is certainly an opportunity to do things differently. That being said, COVID did have an impact on the Exec’s work (we only met once and didn’t actively work on any projects since COVID hit the Western world around February/March) and I personally consider that I missed an opportunity for more online engagement with the SysMus community. That’s totally on me – I’ve never been a big social media sharer (I’ve tried more than once!) and I’m much better at in-person engagement than virtual. It was a missed leadership opportunity for me and I think this makes it a perfect time for me to step down and let someone else take the helm. Perhaps the next Chair and Exec can make better use of the virtual world than I could!

Perhaps a more virtual world will allow us to be more inclusive and succeed in engaging young music researchers from all continents. Perhaps it will also make it easier for smaller labs from different areas of the world to host SysMus. Perhaps the next Executive will have other great new ideas to bring to the community. With the candidates we have running for the next Exec, I am confident that SysMus is in good hands and I walk away content with the work we’ve done and excited to see what comes next!

Jan, Member-at-large (2018-2020)

As always during the last two years, Sarah summarized everything very well. It surely was a team effort but Sarah has fulfilled her position as chair very well and has introduced many innovative ideas that we were happy to discuss, add to and work on. The new webpage gives an overview of some of the work and if you haven’t done it yet, I suggest that you go and take a look at it.

After attending three SysMus conferences (2014-2017), giving a workshop at the fantastic SysMus’20 and being part of the executive committee for two years, I am now looking forward to organizing next year’s SysMus at the Center for Music in the Brain in Aarhus with a motivated team of early career researchers. I am excited to get to know the new executive committee and look forward to sharing our ideas and plans for SysMus’21…

Kelly, Advisor (2018-2020) 

It’s been a pleasure to serve on the very first Executive Committee for SysMus. Several of the other Exec members are actually people I first met at a SysMus conference years ago, so I feel I can truly say that SysMus is an excellent opportunity to get to know the people who will be your future peers and colleagues in the field. It’s also been great to see this community continuing to grow; in (virtually) attending some events at SysMus20 there were many new names I did not know, from many different countries, and I’m so pleased to see that this group is thriving and continually attracting new interest.  

I hope the next Exec members will be able to pick up where we left off in terms of continuing to find innovative solutions for enabling SysMus to be an inclusive and wide-reaching organisation. As Sarah mentioned, the virtual nature of SysMus20 was essentially forced upon us by the Covid-19 crisis, but had many added benefits in showing that this community is able to very successfully integrate members from across the globe via virtual presentations and conference participation. Although I hope that there are also more opportunities to meet in person in the future, it will be very useful to continue to consider hybrid models that enable some virtual and some in-person elements in future SysMus events. In addition, I hope that the extensive hosting resources that we have begun to put together, based on information collated across several previous SysMus conferences, will be of benefit to future hosts, who can make use of all these suggestions while also continuing to generate exciting new ideas on how to bring the SysMus community together.

Claudia, Member-at-large (2018-2020)

Reflecting the past two years, I am glad and happy that I could be part of the SysMus Executive Committee as a member-at-large. Sarah and Josh did a great job leading the committee and bringing forward new ideas. That way, it was a pleasure to support the team effort to ensure the continuation of the SysMus Series and its further development.

After joining the media technology group at a Technical University, it was a good way to still stay connected within the SysMus community and spread the spirit across the disciplines.

Thanks to Diana’s flexibility in moving SysMus2020 to a fully online conference I see SysMus will continue no matter what difficult times we will be facing (hopefully not as bad again as this year :)). At the end I can just thank everyone of the old committee for a really constructive term and meeting atmosphere and look forward to what the new committee will be accomplishing.

SysMus Executive 2020-2022

We’re very pleased to pass the baton to the new SysMus Executive. Your new Exec members are:

Chair – Joshua Bamford

Vice-Chair – Diana Kayser

Advisor – Birgitta Burger

Secretary – Landon Peck

Members-at-large – Claudia Stirnat and Rory Kirk

And with that, we’ll let them take it from here!

Life after a PhD in Systematic Musicology: How You Might Prepare for Industry? 

You don’t get to be a grad student forever. At some point, you will take everything you’ve been working on in the past however many years, bundle it into a few hundred page document, defend it, and be immensely proud of the fact that you completed a doctoral degree on the topic of systematic musicology. In a utopian situation, you take a few weeks off after your defense, then come back to “reality” or the “real world” and consider what you want to do next. 

Maybe upon your return you get lucky and apply for a position at a university and are able to start teaching and researching right away. Or maybe you get a postdoc, pack up your bags and move to a new city to continue on your academic adventure for a few years, or maybe you end up taking an adjunct gig somewhere and have to teach part-time with no guarantee of future employment at something near a living wage. Or maybe you take a good look five, ten, or twenty years down the road and think to yourself: besides academia, what else is out there? What if you wanted to get a job in industry? Will I never get to do research again if I “leave academia”?

How does a graduate student in systematic musicology explore what else is out there? While there’s an entire culture built around how to continue in academia, there’s not nearly as much available for grad students to figure out how to land an industry job from within the academy. 

What benefits could preparing for being employable in industry have? And what steps could you take today in order to achieve these goals this week? In this post, I’d like to directly address these questions in order to provide advice for current graduate students in the SysMus community.

Before I get going, I assume that if you’re reading this post, you’re a graduate student (in systematic musicology specifically) and are interested in the idea of finding work after graduate school in industry. By industry, I mean literally any job that is not an academic job (aka what most of the world does). Specifically, I want to give four pieces of advice and the reasons behind  them as to how you can best prepare yourself for getting a job in industry. It’s the how and why of what I wish someone would have told me a few years ago.

If you don’t want to read the rest of the post and just want the actionable items, here they are:

1. Make a LinkedIn account but don’t position yourself as an academic.

2. Ask people who do the job that you are interested in doing for help. 

3. Create an online presence. 

4. Get better at programming.

Though as academics we’re never satisfied with just the answer to what we should do; we want to know how and why. With that in mind, let’s get started investigating why I think you should do these four things if you're interested in a job in industry. 

But why take my advice? Since this isn’t my personal blog, I should probably introduce myself and establish a bit of credibility before taking some random advice from some dude on the internet. My name is Dave (though you’ll find me on the internet as @DavidJohnBaker since I have a pretty basic Western name) and as of last year, I completed my Ph.D. in Music Theory at Louisiana State University where I investigated how tools from computational musicology and cognitive psychology can help inform how we teach aural skills in music school. 

While a grad student, I went to a couple of SysMuses (is that the plural?) in 2014 (Goldsmiths) and 2017 (Queen Mary) currently am serving as the trainee representative for the Society of Music Perception and Cognition. I went directly from my PhD to working a non-academic job where I am currently Lead Instructor of Data Science at Flatiron School in London, England. In my current position I teach people skills they need in order to get jobs in industry, specifically jobs as (~junior) data scientists. I watch people make this transition into industry literally every day and as a former member of the SysMus community, am more than willing to try to help out any SysMus people I can if they’re interested in what I can offer in the future. 

Ok, let’s get to it.

Make a LinkedIn

If you have spent any time in academia, you know that no one in academia uses LinkedIn. In fact, I have heard some senior academics brag about the fact that they literally do not get the point of the platform, don't have an account, and pride themselves in not knowing about it at all. These are probably the same people who also boast about not knowing the difference between a CV and a resume. 

This makes sense in a lot of ways.

Academics don't need LinkedIn because the currency of what we value as academics is not an apparent part of the website's infrastructure. Furthermore, what “counts” in academia does not “count” in most industry jobs. There's no great way to display all your ever-increasing publication record, the pedigree of the institutions from which you have worked your way through, or any sort of teaching or service accolades you've accumulated over the years.

And that's OK. Your persona on LinkedIn shouldn't be your academic persona. 

If you're staring at your yet-to-be-fleshed-out LinkedIn page and are having trouble inserting your square block of an academic persona into industy's round hole, this trouble is just a symptom of the real reason I picked the first piece of advice as creating a LinkedIn account: you first need to realise that your value working in industry comes from your ability to add value to an organization; your online profile should reflect you understand that.

So how do you do that?

The first step is trying to figure out what value you can bring to an organization. If you're working for a company (as opposed to a charity/not-for-profit), this value best translates as the literal monetary value that you will be able to bring to the company. You need to think about ways that you can position yourself to make it very clear via how you present yourself that you understand  the role you are about to undertake is to create value for the company. 

Can you do analyses that will make their marketing more efficient? Can you write a small classifier that helps eliminate bots from their platform? Are you great at communicating the value of your work to non-technical stakeholders? 

You should ask yourself: how can I best present myself on LinkedIn in order to communicate that the skills that I have are directly beneficial to the company that I will work for? 

Just like re-writing your #scicomm blog posts and tweets to make it easier for the general public to understand the multi-level mixed model you ran and wrote up in your most recently published peer-reviewed journal article, you need to rephrase what you can do in the language of the industry you want to enter.

A lot of this comes from talking to people currently working in the area you want to break into (covered in my next point). For example, in the world of data science this can range from understanding that your background as a music psychologist in experimental design needs to be rephrased as proficiency in AB testing or maybe causal inference. You can use your latest paper you've published as a vehicle to talk about how you excel at taking ill-defined problems, turning them into something quantifiable, performing some sort of reproducible analysis on this, then sharing the importance and results of you  work with both technical (fellow academics) and non-technical stakeholders. 

I'll lastly note here that when you are advocating for yourself on LinkedIn, I'd say it's better to NOT try to brand yourself as an academic, but rather the job title that you eventually want. In my case, my LinkedIn is me as a data scientist and educator. Am I really that? Who knows. You kind of are who you say who you are, you just need to be ready to back it up. For whatever job you want to do, you just need to be able to somehow to demonstrate you know what the requirements of the job are and that you can do that. 

In terms of industry, the closest job that my skills align with is data scientist and identifying as that (even though I don’t know if that’s how I’d describe how I think of myself) makes it easier for others to get what I do.

I felt uncomfortable as a grad student at first calling myself a data scientist having never had a job where I had that title, but if you are graduate level scientist and understand basic inferential statistics, can spend some time and page your way through some introductory machine learning textbooks (for example, Introduction to Statistical Learning) , and can run a linear regression in R or Python and correctly interpret it, you're more than qualified to at least put your title as a Junior Data Scientist who is looking for roles. If not, see point three below. 

As for other jobs that you might want, a large part of this is going to be doing research (what we do best) in the area you want to enter then positioning yourself accordingly. 

Remember, you can always learn new models or frameworks, one of your biggest assets as a grad student in systematic musicology is the ability to learn and synthesize complex things quickly.

Don't worry that your academic side doesn't show on LinkedIn, just add a note that if the person visiting your page on LinkedIn wants to see your academic side, check out your website or Google Scholar. Even though as a grad student your identity is probably 100% intertwined with your academic work, for your own mental health, it’s probably time to start to separate your identity from your work. And what better way than to have a LinkedIn persona that showcases how what you know can be applied elsewhere. 

Of course this will take a bit of research to find out how best to communicate this all, but research is what we academics do best! 

Ask for Help 

Just like academia, the world of industry is also hugely about who you know and how they can help you. Unlike academia, things in the world of industry move at a much faster rate and there's a lot more off an ebb and flow in when and where you can get hired to do what. 

So how do you navigate this new space?

You need to ask for help via some sort of network. Granted, when you are first looking into entering the world of industry, you probably don't know too many people, but if you reach out to those you do know (especially those who can relate to your current situation, former academics) I’d bet you'll be very surprised of how supportive people can be. 

Specifically, how do you do this?

Often it's a matter of adding someone on LinkedIn (LinkedIn is not like Facebook, people add pretty much anyone looking to connect, especially if it comes with a meaningful note), tweeting to someone you think might be helpful, or asking around in your current academic network about people who you can best reach out to in order to start  building those bridges. If they can help, most likely they will; If they can't help, they probably will direct you to someone who is better suited for your specific situation. If this doesn’t happen, you can message me and I’d be more than happy to try to help you out. 

If there's some sort of professional space that you are looking to enter that doesn't have an obvious person-you-know point of entry, one of the other highly suggested "things to do" is to go to some sort of Meet Up around the topic you're interested in. People who go to meetups in general all tend to be interested in the same thing (obviously, or they wouldn't spend their free time going to them) and are often looking to grow their community so attending an event is a great way to show your interest. Right now (2020), many physical events are currently cancelled, but this doesn’t mean there are not stil online events. People are adapting quickly. 

So what do you even message them about?

Well you don't really have to know exactly what you want, but remember it's always easier to give people specific requests when you approach them and say something like:

"I want to be able to apply for jobs in music and advertising in 8 months time, what  should I do to best prepare for that and work at a company like Shazam?", 

Though don’t feel like you need to know exactly what you want.  You should also feel free to  message people and ask for guidance in the form of an informational interview. There's a lot of information on the web on this, so I won't go too much into that here. ( https://hbr.org/2016/02/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-an-informational-interview ) 

Have an Online Presence 

In addition to just having a LinkedIn account (your industry Google Scholar!), I think it also helps to have a bit of an online presence. This could mean having a Twitter feed, ideally a website and possibly even a blog. If you're interested in reasons as why you might want to do this, check out this post here by David Robinson (http://varianceexplained.org/r/start-blog/) on why it's a good idea for aspiring data scientists but many of the reason hold outside of data science. If you think starting a blog to just share information is a lame idea, you can read this post I did on my personal website after talking about this with one of my former students (https://davidjohnbaker.rbind.io/post/blog-on-blogs/).

The executive summary of that (notice I didn't say abstract) is having this presence allows you to communicate with the community you want to enter. It shows ahead of time how you think about problems. It can also catch the eye of people in the industry you want to work in. 

For example, maybe you want to stay in the world of music and not do "data science" but try to get on the ever growing data train for arts management. If you can show what you can do by showing how you take some publicly available data and turn it into a meaningful narrative, you’re going to stick out much more in both processes of networking to show your value which will eventually get you hired. 

Get Better at Programming

The last thing that I would be remiss not to mention, especially for those doing any sort of quantitative related research is to get better at coding. 

What blows my mind is the amount of people who learn all these super-out-there stats for getting their research published, but do not put in the time (especially given the freedom you have in grad school) to teach yourself some sort of open source programming language. Arguments for open and reproducible science aside, coding will open up more doors for you in terms of career and salary than anything else right now on the market coming from academia. 

It's a bit of a pain to learn in some ways, but one of the reasons it pays so well is because it is hard to learn. But if you are no longer limited by what software is in front of you (or what your company can afford…) then your value will increase not only in the near future, but I am sure it will carve out a great trajectory for you over the next twenty years.

I feel confident in passing on this advice to the SysMus crowd in particular because in doing a graduate research degree, this process of just getting good at asking meaningful questions is the thing that is way more difficult to teach and get better at in a workplace setting. Now working with a lot of people who are aspiring data scientists, I have seen time and time again that just like practicing an instrument, you will get better at coding by just practicing it daily. 

In your current capacity as a graduate student, the way to work on this is to slowly move your projects to something like R or Python, and to try to make those projects available for people to see on Github or the Open Science Framework. Just learning how to document them well and work in a code based environment is an extremely good investment for the next 30 years of your working career (assuming median age of most SysMus readers is a little less than 30). Doing this and posting it will show to future colleagues and employers that you are going to be a colleague who is useful and easy to collaborate with.

If you’re totally new to this, the way I would suggest going forward is to first make your way through R for Data Science ( https://r4ds.had.co.nz/ ) , then read Hands on Programming with R ( https://rstudio-education.github.io/hopr/ ) , then slowly try your hand at easy coding problems on websites like r/daily programming challenge ( https://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer/ ) , daily coding challenge ( https://www.dailycodingproblem.com/ )  or code wars ( https://www.codewars.com/). 

When going through daily challenges, try to think of each one as a little brain teaser.  They’re just like nerdy crosswords or sudoku. It’s OK to look at the answers if you don’t get it after a couple of minutes, remember the point is to learn new ways of thinking and coding, not test the limits of your patience. Of course programming languages are not spoken languages and you also need to remember that when you are starting out, you need to build up a lot of vocabulary and see what a language can do before you can expect yourself to just look at a blank page and start typing code like some sort of hacker. Just look at a lot of code at first, the writing will come soon enough. 

In terms of what languages to learn, it really depends what you want to do, but you can’t go wrong with R, SQL, and Python. If you work in anything quant related, you have to learn SQL. Everyone does SQL. Then maybe pick either R or Python. I suggest R here (and above) because it’s way more common where you currently are as grad student in systematic musicology where you can get help from peers. Don’t make things harder for yourself. You can learn other coding languages later. There are tons of articles on the internet differentiating why you might start with one or the other, but I’d suggest picking the one that you will find most useful right now for what you’re doing as a grad student. 

I would also suggest slowly making your way through Introduction to Statistical Learning with R (ISLR) if you are remotely interested in data science. There are also data science equivalents to the daily coding challenges (https://datascienceprep.com/).  Note that in the data science world it’s wise to learn both Python and R, but if you’re getting to that point and want resources on all this, please just get in touch with me personally and hopefully by then I will have some more resources to point you towards. You don’t have to do it all at once. 

If you need further incentive, I suggest checking out the most recent stack overflow calculator (https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary ) and just putting in one year of R or Python in combination with a doctoral degree. 

Why?

Now you don't have to take my advice here and the advice provided is not exhaustive at all. But if you are in the middle of your PhD and are reading this, I would argue that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from doing a little bit of industry investment each week as a graduate student. If you say you don't have time, you’re probably taking a very parochial view  of what your career and life could be by putting all your eggs in the proverbial academic basket. This is not a smart move on either personal or professional note (you never know when life is just going to happen). 

If you start to build this side of your professional development, you’ll get a couple of things. I think the most valuable thing you will gain is the peace of mind that when you are done with the monumental task that is doing a PhD, you will have some options waiting for you. By investing in these skills you will open up more avenues in your own research and will further aid your ability to pursue the questions that got you into academia in the first place. Lastly, by just trying to meet more people outside the Ivory Tower, you’ll meet more friends than you would have otherwise. 

Winding this post down I want to reflect on a talk that I also heard David Huron give at the Society for Music Theory in Vancouver the during the second year of my PhD where he predicted that a lot of the research that will capture the public's attention in the realm of music (broadly defined) will come from the world of music industry where they have endless amounts of data (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0508-z) and he predicted that the category divide between academia and industry will only become more important to be able to walk back and forth between the two. Now I don’t think the most important questions will be asked at this intersection, but it’s something to consider.  

Why do I think this is important to note? Well it’s worth saying out loud that even if you don't go on to an academic job, research still happens outside the Ivory Tower. There's a big demand for the skills you are cultivating as a graduate student. You have a lot more value than you think at this point.

Of course this might not be as idyllic as the past few paragraphs have made some parts of working an industry job sound. There’s a lot less time to work on things that are uniquely yours. How you spend your time is at the discretion of your boss and the needs of the company. If you want to work on your own stuff you have to do it on your own time. But the flip side of that argument is that you actually have your own time. 

Right now in my current role I am finding it a bit frustrating to work on a few of my pet projects, but again this comes in exchange for a job with a salary that reflects the years of training I have put in, a healthcare plan,  the right to not have to “take my work home with me” after the end of the day, and peace of mind that now knowing how the industry works.

This has been quite the essay, but hopefully it's explored a space that I know I wish I would have heard more about when I was a PhD student. Please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to talk more about this! 

David Baker, PhD

What having/being an academic ‘mentor’ can do for you

People often seem surprised when I talk about having an academic ‘mentor’, perhaps because they are wondering why someone would take the time to work with me and support my academic career, unless they were my supervisor. Given that academics are notoriously stretched to their limit, I can understand why the idea of an academic mentor might seem uncommon or unrealistic. To quickly unpack what I mean by the term, to me an ‘academic mentor’ is somebody (not necessarily your supervisor) who supports your academic development and acts as a role model. They might give you advice or feedback, share their experiences with you, collaborate with you or signpost you to relevant opportunities, share resources, provide encouragement, or all of the above! 

Of course, your supervisor might do many of these things, and personally I am very fortunate to have supervisors who do all of this and more. But here, I want to talk about my academic mentors who are not currently fulfilling an official supervisory role, and how beneficial their support has been. 

During my Masters in Applied Psychology of Music at the University of Leeds, I undertook an international research project in Melbourne, Australia. In Melbourne, I met and was supervised by Professor Jane Davidson, Dr Amanda Krause and Dr Samantha Dieckmann. I won’t go into detail about my time in Australia here (that’s a blog for another day!) but I can safely say I learnt a great deal from my new colleagues who supported and encouraged me throughout the experience. After returning from Australia I hoped that we would keep in touch, but I could not have predicted the level of mentorship that they would continue to provide. Since returning to the UK, we have co-authored a paper together and I have represented my colleagues by presenting our collaborative research at two conferences. Even now over a year later, we continue to collaborate on various projects. Amanda has also given me advice about applying for PhDs, talked me through how to peer review journal articles, helped me shape my CV and build an online profile as a researcher (although I’m not sure I’ll ever be as good a ‘tweeter’ as her!) Having an academic mentor has been a fantastic experience for me for a number of reasons. Firstly, it has taught me how to collaborate with different academics – something that I know will form an integral part of my (academic) career. Before this experience I’d never collaborated with anyone outside of my discipline or institution. Working as part of an interdisciplinary team was really exciting and has challenged me to think about my work from multiple perspectives. I also feel more confident in myself as a researcher, and in my ability to make valuable contributions to projects. Becoming a little bit braver has meant that I am much more likely to reach out to other academics or approach people at conferences, which has resulted in some new and exciting connections. Whilst I know that my attempts to connect with others may not always result in a new collaboration or even a positive interaction, I am now much more likely to try! 

Whilst writing this blog I realised that you, the reader, might be thinking ‘well, of course it’s great to have an academic mentor, but why would anyone be one?’ Wondering this same thing myself, I asked Amanda why she thought being someone’s academic mentor was a good idea. Here’s what she had to say: 

“One of the things that’s pushed me to take on advisory roles is that I really feel we are a global community, in terms of music science/ music psychology. We exist around the world, but we aren’t a massively large discipline. When I was a PhD student, I went to my first conference (ICMPC) alone. I didn’t know anyone, and I needed to make a community. What I’ve taken from that is that we need to build this community because a lot of us work one-on-one or in small supervisory teams, so I think building a network is what I find really important and valuable.

“There’s real value in helping each other learn how to be better writers, better reviewers and better editors. There’s value in me helping you work through your writing, because that helps me with my writing – it’s mutually beneficial. Me investing time with you means that we can work together more efficiently. While there is a time investment, it has a long-lasting pay-out.

“We’ve published a paper together, but we have more that we continue to work on, so we’re growing a continuing, collaborative partnership. We also have different backgrounds, knowledge and experiences, which helps every part of the research process. So, what I might not have, you might have, and we can mutually benefit from that. What’s great is that our collaboration transcends globally, it doesn’t matter where you are, it’s outside of your faculty, university, country, and that’s great!”

As a PhD student who spends the vast majority of my time working alone, having an international network of supervisors, academic mentors and peers has been key to me feeling part of an academic community. So, whether you feel like you could benefit from having an academic mentor, or you feel like you could fulfil this role for someone else, I hope attending SysMus 2020 brings you lots of new connections in our music science community.

Melissa Kirby, PhD Student @ University of Leeds & Dr. Amanda Krause, @ The University of Melbourne  

Reproducible research in systematic musicology

Academia is in the midst of a crisis. It’s been most publicised in Psychology, since a 2015 paper was only able to replicate 39 out of 100 studies, but is by no means a problem exclusive to one discipline. The replication crisis has now hit most of the social and medical sciences (and even that 2015 paper has not been immune to replication issues). Systematic Musicology, being an inherently interdisciplinary field that draws upon methods from multiple disciplines, is prone to all the same issues that plague its related fields. Indeed, some have argued that empirical music research has been particularly slow to respond to the need for replication, as it is generally considered to be low risk. Although the cost of an erroneous theory of music perception may be low compared to that of a cancer treatment, trust in a science can still be eroded by poor quality research. Indeed, music psychology has experienced this through the wide impact of the Mozart Effect, despite criticism of the original study.

Psychology may have been the canary in the coal mine for reproducibility, uncovering numerous issues in the way science is done and reported, but psychology may also have the solutions. Many of the problems we now face may be attributed to cognitive biases, and a whole new metascience is beginning to emerge. So, just what are the issues at the core of the replication crises, and how should we tackle them?

The Problem

Science is based on a cycle of reviewing literature, developing theories, testing hypotheses and interpreting empirical observation. Issues can arise at every step of the way, and it starts with how we conduct reviews. We’re all familiar with confirmation bias, but scientists are certainly not immune. Traditional narrative literature reviews are prone to cherry picking, as the author will often be biased towards including those papers that reinforce their theory, or at least which provide a clear story, ahead of those that portray a more complex and nuanced picture. This is a kind of paltering – not lying, but not telling the full truth either – and is more common in politics than science, but we be wary of it. Care must also be taken in summarising a paper, as often the contradictory findings are not reported clearly in the abstract. This can happen in successive reviews, and sometimes a paper is misinterpreted by multiple authors, who rely on each other’s interpretation of the original paper, rather than going back to the primary evidence. This chain of misinterpretation can lead to the canonisation of false facts, and can be very persistent in the literature. Even with a comprehensive literature review, often conflicting evidence is hard to find because of a publication bias towards positive results.

Problems arise also in how we test hypotheses. The trouble with low statistical power has been widely publicised. This usually occurs when sample sizes are too small, and can mean that a study may fail to find an effect (type 2 error), but can also result in wildly exaggerated effect sizes, as the results can be skewed by just a few outliers. In addition, there may be biases associated with selection of participants. Many studies, including those in music psychology, suffer from a WEIRD problem, in that most participants come from a very narrow Western, Education, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic population. Studies routinely use very particular types of people – often undergraduate students who have volunteered – who may not be representative of the whole human species. Meanwhile, some studies are quite simply poorly designed, failing to counterbalance conditions, to adequately control all relevant variables or to use reliable and valid measures that are consistent with the literature. 

A whole range of mistakes can also be made in analysis. While journals may be guilty of being biased towards accepting and publishing positive results, researchers may also be biased against the null hypothesis. Whether conscious or not, many studies have been subjected to Harking, P-hacking, or simply failing to correct for multiple comparisons. Neuroscience is particularly prone to errors through multiple comparison, with one study finding statistically significant brain activity in a dead fish. Failure to report effect size, or to demonstrate appropriate statistical power is also common, and can lead to misleading conclusions.

The Solution 

As Brandolini’s law states that “the amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that to produce it,” so great lengths have gone into correcting the failures of past scientific practice. Just as Psychology has problems with reproducibility, Psychology has also been at the forefront of devising solutions. Researchers may not be immune to cognitive biases – this is the source of many of the problems outlined above – but they can develop ways to mitigate them.

The major Music Psychology journals have begun raising their standards for reporting statistics, which is a positive step. Authors are increasingly being encouraged to conduct power analyses in order to justify their sample size, as well as to report effect sizes in addition to p-values. Simply saying that an effect is significant is no longer good enough; we need to know how great the effect is, and whether the sample is large enough to be reliable. Many journals are also providing open access options (although beware of the differences between Green and Gold Open Access), and even open data. 

It’s also becoming increasingly common to publish datasets, stimuli and tools for analysis either as supplementary material or as a standalone paper. Not only is this consistent with the collaborative aims of reproducible research, but it’s also a great way to get an extra publication. These can be highly cited if many other researchers decide to use your tools or data.

Another publication option is the systematic review. This differs from the typical narrative review that accompanies most papers, and which is highly susceptible to the author’s biases. A systematic review, by contrast, states its search methodology and criteria for inclusion upfront. It may also be expanded to a meta-analysis, where results from the constituent studies are pooled and re-analysed as a larger dataset. There are numerous resources available for those wishing to conduct a systematic review, including the PRISMA statement, the Equator Network, and the gold-standard of systematic reviews: Cochrane. 

Finally, one of the easiest and most important steps that we can all do is pre-registration. This is a way of formalising what we all do when starting out a new research project, as it requires authors to declare their hypothesis and methods before collecting data. This pre-registration can then be made public and referred to in the eventual publication, as proof that the actual study did not deviate from what was planned. This prevents authors from going on statistical “fishing trips” or changing their hypotheses after collecting data, and it can be useful for holding yourself to account as much as it is for anyone else. That’s not to say that one can’t deviate at all from the pre-registration plan, it’s just that one has to be honest about what was planned, and what was done post-hoc. Exploratory analysis is still possible, it just needs to be declared.

There are some options of different databases in which one can pre-register a study, but the most popular would be with the Centre for Open Science or with AsPredicted. The COS provides a more extensive pre-registration template, while AsPredicted is very brief. I’ve personally found the process of pre-registering a study to be really useful, as it forces you to think carefully about the study design from the outset.

For those who want to go a step further than pre-registration, there’s also the option of Registered Reports. These were first offered as a publication option by Cortex, and have since caught on at a number of other journals. Music Perception now offers Registered Reports, and other music journals may soon follow. A Registered Report is essentially the Introduction and Methods section of an article, which is submitted to the journal for peer-review before the data is collected. This means a larger portion of the writing process is done towards the start of a project, and carries the benefit that one can receive feedback from reviewers before actually conducting the study. It’s a nice way of avoiding Reviewer 2 from asking you to completely re-do parts of the study, because they were already asked for their opinion before it began. The best thing is that once the Methods are accepted, then the journal provisionally accepts the eventual article for publication, regardless of what the results look like. This is a really nice way to avoid any publication bias towards positive results, and it means you can conduct the study with peace of mind, knowing that it will be published. Again, the Centre for Open Science has some great resources for those wishing to explore Registered Reports. 

What about musicology? 

So, how does music research fit into all this? Systematic musicology, being an umbrella discipline of sorts, sits in a funny position within the academic world. We participate in the same academic publishing industry as any other discipline, and so the problems of bias in publishing (towards novel and positive results) undoubtedly exist, along with new innovations such as open access, alternatives to peer-review, and the concept of pre-prints. We also use a wide variety of methods, drawing upon many other disciplines in both the humanities and sciences. 

Where we use scientific and statistical methods, we are subject to all the issues discussed above. The problems associated with reporting p-values, bias against the null hypothesis, failing to openly report where we have deviated from our planned hypothesis or methods, etc. hit music psychology as much as they do general psychology. As an interdisciplinary field, we must be always aware of the latest developments in the disciplines from which we draw, and this is particularly true for how we test hypotheses. This is one of the great challenges of interdisciplinary research, as it’s hard to stay on top of multiple disciplines, but we can’t let ourselves fall behind. 

Our field may be particularly susceptible to problems in reproducibility, because our subject matter is quite difficult to test scientifically. A lot of research in Music Psychology, Music Therapy and Music Education relies upon testing musical stimuli or activity against some kind of control condition. However, finding adequate control conditions with which to contrast “music” can be a challenge. Music is a multi-faceted thing, and it requires great rigour to describe both musical and non-musical conditions in a way that they can be successfully reproduced by other researchers. Failure to do so can lead to unsubstantiated findings which are refuted by later studies, just as with the aforementioned Mozart effect.

Systematic musicology doesn’t only draw upon the sciences, but also the humanities. Some would argue that reproducibility and “Open Science” (as the movement is sometimes called) is only relevant to the sciences. I mean, it’s all there in the name, isn’t it? For this reason, many prefer the term “Open Research”, to be inclusive of the humanities. Indeed, the humanities do have problems with reproducibility, sometimes due to the very nature of subjective and qualitative research. This can be exacerbated when used in conjunction with scientific methods, as we do.

We must also be aware of the unique challenges associated with using music as our subject. The general response to the reproducibility crisis has been greater openness and transparency. This sometimes doesn’t work in all fields, as there are issues around confidentiality (particularly if working in an educational or clinical setting). Making one’s data completely open may be difficult if that data involves recordings of musicians who require their identity to be anonymised. There are also issues of copyright, which might prevent an author from openly publishing their stimuli. Ultimately, every researcher must think long and hard about the best way to make their research more accessible and reproducible, in ways that are appropriate.

Where to from here?

The Open Research movement is constantly developing, and nobody would claim to have the perfect model for how all research should be done. Some would claim that all the solutions provided here are redundant, as reproducible research is, at it’s core, simply “good” research; this is how science was always supposed to be done. However, the fact that this conversation has gained so much attention is surely good for science, as it forces us all to reflect on how we have deviated from best practice, and how we might improve things in the future. There are still many unanswered questions, such as how to create behaviour change within academia (an interesting meta-science in itself) and who we are open to (when we start considering science literacy and citizen science). These questions are actively being discussed at places like the Open Science MOOC, the Centre for Open Science, the UK Reproducibility Network and ReproducibiliTea journal clubs, and it’s worth joining those conversations. There’s also a forthcoming special issue on Open Science in Musicology at EMR.

Ultimately, by opening up and improving our methods and data, we can begin to shift the conversation to the really important stuff. If everyone is pre-registering their studies, and publishing the details of their analyses, then we don’t need to focus so much on critiquing each other’s methods (or in some cases, contacting the authors to ask what their methods actually were); we can trust that their results are reliable. Instead, we can focus on developing theories, different interpretations, and how it fits into the bigger picture.

Joshua S. Bamford, Vice-Chair of SysMus Executive Committee, University of Oxford, UK

SysMus - Do you remember the first time?

Out of all conferences that I have attended in the last years, SysMus has always been my favourite. Not just because it’s not one of those acronyms where you’re not 100 percent sure what all of those letters mean. The reasons for my enthusiasm for this conference series are plenty, but first and foremost it has been the first academic conference I have ever attended. It’s like your first car you never forget and have fond memories of. To stay within this analogy, SysMus put me from the passive passenger seat into the driver’s seat of my academic pathway. SysMus was like the quiet road on which you start to learn how to drive until you get comfortable enough to drive on the busy main road. 

SysMus is special in many ways but I think it is also the people that you meet there who make it a very special experience. As it is aimed at the “younger” generation of academics (meaning pre-PhD), everyone is in some way on the same level. As an Early Career Researcher working on a Master’s or PhD everyone is still in the process of trying to find their own place. By taking the already accomplished academics out of the equation, SysMus is more than just a conference but creates a community where everyone is approachable which makes networking (buzzword alert!) easier than it may be the case at mixed conferences  where it sometimes takes a lot of courage (mostly in combination with wine) to approach people.

To return to my analogy:  If I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to practice driving aka “being at a conference” at SysMus, other conferences would have felt like driving on the Autobahn with a blindfold on and would have been an absolute disaster. Maybe it wouldn’t have been THAT bad, but ultimately the experiences I made at SysMus resulted in me being less nervous when I came into the “real world” of academia (which is admittedly a debatable choice of words…) and things seemed less intimidating as they would have been otherwise. Thanks to SysMus I had more confidence in myself and my academic work which made it easier to discuss my work with academics that have many years of experience.

SysMus19 - You say you've got to go home

SysMus19 was hosted in Berlin, and I was really excited to be in my hometown again. It was a strange experience to not be there for family visits. I chose to stay at an AirBnB close to the conference venue as staying with family would have meant to commute for 1.5h to Schöneberg in the morning - and back in the evening. I was not prepared to do that and this turned out to be a wise decision. But it did seem as if “everyone knows someone who lives in Berlin” is far from being a myth: many participants were staying with friends or relatives in different parts of town. This was not a problem as the venue was very well connected and easy to reach with public transport. Although I don’t think there are places in Berlin that are difficult to reach by public transport - it’s one of those things that seems to work. Sometimes you have to change trains and busses several times - but you’ll eventually get there (It’s like doing a PhD - there’s never a direct route, you might get a bit lost along the way, but you’ll reach your goal eventually - I promise this was the last analogy).  

As the Executive Committee is a very recent addition to the SysMus organisational structure, Josh and I were very happy to represent at the conference. We would like to thank Isabelle and Richard for letting us be part of the opening ceremony and giving us the opportunity to say a few words about SysMus, the Executive Committee and our function(s) within the SysMus community. 

The conference had a nice and inspiring atmosphere and the talks were really interesting. It was nice that, as in the years before,  the presentations and posters at SysMus are of a high standard, despite being "just" a student conference. 

(As mentioned before, a conference report is in progress where more details on the actual conference can be found.)

I really liked that there was an organised opportunity to meet the organisers and other attendees the evening before the conference kicked off. It’s always nice to get to know some people in a rather informal setting with plates full of carbs and glasses full of beer (or other drinks of choice). It’s been nice to see some familiar faces and catch up, as conferences tend to be busy and there’s not always an opportunity for that. 

I also  enjoyed the conference dinner which was announced rather spontaneously. There was enough time to walk from the conference venue which many of us made use of. It took a bit more than an hour to get to the traditional Berlin-Pub embedded into one of the S-Bahn-Bögen underneath the tracks between Friedrichstraße and Hackescher Markt. On our way we got lots of sight-seeing in as we walked past the Berlin Philarmonie, waved at Potsdamer Platz and the Sony Center, made a stop at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, walked through Brandenburg Gate,  Unter den Linden and then eventually arrived at where the food was. Traditional Berlin food was served buffet style (= the best style), and lots of beer was ordered. The atmosphere was amazing, until a few nerds got out their laptops to look at a paper by Carl Friston. There is, of course, no photographic evidence that suggests that I or any other member of the Executive Committee, say...Josh (just throwing out names here) were part of  this madness.

SysMus20 - Just as long as you save a piece for me, oh yeah!

To conclude and slowly bring this to an end, I have to say that these three days were very interesting and I came out buzzing with new ideas. I am definitely looking forward to the next one - and this time I am transitioning from being an attendee to being a host. Crazy times ahead! 

I am really exited to bring SysMus20 from my hometown to my temporary home. SysMus20 will be hosted at the Department of Music at the University of York. We’re in the beginning of the planning  phase and will keep you updated via Social Media and our Website! Submission for abstracts will open shortly as well, and we’re looking forward to many exciting contributions.

Diana Kayser, PhD Student @ York Music Psychology Group and Chair of SysMus20

How SysMus (and other conferences) helped me become an Assistant Professor in Music Psychology

As a relatively early career researcher who has recently been hired into a permanent academic post, I have subsequently found myself in a position where many of my colleagues and acquaintances who are still doing PhDs or postdocs have asked me for advice on how to land the academic ‘dream job’. I can’t claim to have any particular secret to success or fool-proof recipe for such an endeavour, though I’ve tried my best to detail what worked for me and what I think my most important choices were along the way. Although, in my opinion, the word ‘networking’ is, in some contexts, so overused it loses all meaning, I do think that my experiences at conferences during my PhD were one crucial stepping stone toward where I am today. This particular post will focus on how I think SysMus and other conferences were one aspect of my postgraduate experience that helped to prepare me for successfully pursuing an academic career. 

As Director of SysMus 14 at Goldsmiths, University of London I took on a lot of tasks (and a lot of stress!) that from an outside perspective may have appeared to be big distractions from my PhD project, but ultimately taught me various skills that I could not have learnt elsewhere as a PhD student. SysMus14 required me to learn to navigate the inner workings of a university (from setting up a cost centre with the Finance department, to obtaining funding from and working closely with the Graduate School, to dealing with the internal catering company); such tasks are things that academic staff members often engage with, but students are typically sheltered from. Directing SysMus gave me a first, early glimpse into this (at times, frustrating) world and the complexities of dealing with academic bureaucracy. This might not sound like a main highlight of the job, but I can attest now to the fact that an academic career does not just comprise days full of thinking about abstract ideas in the ‘ivory tower’; there are plenty of administrative and organisational tasks that go with the role, and it was very useful to have this early experience with such tasks to realise what I was getting myself into. SysMus14 was also a new exercise for me in terms of applying for a substantial amount of funding, managing a budget, and event planning (including organising the academic programme, proceedings, room bookings, catering, conference dinner, etc.). These are skills I now use regularly when managing my own research grant, organising research symposia and events in Durham, etc. Finally, planning SysMus14 helped me to develop general skills in delegating tasks and time management, which are of course important to any academic career. 

A major benefit of the SysMus conference series is getting to meet your peers who will make up the next generation of systematic musicologists and music science researchers. I still have regular contact with a variety of people whom I first met at SysMus14; for example, I am now working closely with Liila Taruffi as a colleague at Durham University, and Julian Céspedes-Guevara is a former member of our Music & Science Lab group. I am in regular contact with Diana Kayser for joint activities between our lab and the York Music Psychology Group, I was invited a couple years ago to give a research talk at TU Dresden by Fabian Moss, and I serve on the SysMus Executive Committee with Claudia Stinat, Jan Stupacher, and Sarah Sauvé (as well as Diana Kayser again!). I met all of these people for the first time at SysMus14, and I’m sure we will continue to cross academic paths for many years to come. The typically quite small and supportive community of early career researchers that attend SysMus is something I have yet to experience at any other academic conference. 

 Thinking about conference experiences during my PhD more generally (beyond the SysMus context), attending conferences really helped me to see and learn about the inner workings of research (including the bits that don’t make it into the final, peer-reviewed publications). By attending a range of conferences including ICMPC, SMPC, ESCOM, and Neurosciences and Music during my PhD I was able to meet many of the key researchers in our field and get a really good idea of who I might want to work with as a postdoc or collaborator in future (as well as who to avoid! This sounds negative, but actually can save lots of time and tears by getting to know who the difficult-to-work with people in the field are…Luckily, in our field I personally think the number is quite small). For me, one conference highlight was ESCOM 2015, in which I won the Hickman Early Career Researcher Award, which meant I was selected to give a slightly longer talk as a plenary session (sort of like a mini-keynote). This was a fantastic opportunity to communicate my research to essentially every single person attending this conference, and spurred some very productive discussions and subsequent ideas. I can also attest to the fact that my current colleague, Tuomas Eerola, with whom I now co-direct our lab, remembered that talk as one of his first exposures to my research, so I can truly say that this opportunity provided an invaluable platform for communicating my work that set some initial seeds toward shaping my future career path. 

In terms of the practical aspects of getting to conferences as a PhD student, there are lots of ways to get involved without breaking the bank. Individual conferences often offer student bursaries funded via organisations such as SEMPRE, and many universities also have internal pots of money students can apply for to use towards conference costs. Technological advances have enabled the possibility to attend and/or present at some conferences as a remote participant, which can save you lots of money while also reducing your carbon footprint. The most elaborate example of such an undertaking was the 2018 ICMPC, which was integrated across four hubs on four continents and also allowed for remote participants who were unable to travel to one of these hubs. Personally, I would still advise most PhD students, in particular, to give yourself a few opportunities throughout your course of study to make face-to-face contact with relevant academics in the field so people can start to get to know you as a person, rather than simply a name on paper. Though arguably this aim can also be met remotely to some extent (e.g. by arranging one-to-one or small group Skype meetings, either within a conference context or at another mutually convenient time). By the time I finished my PhD I had met quite a few of the ‘big names’ in the field; this was probably achieved mostly by attending conferences regularly (around twice a year) during my PhD, in addition to co-authoring papers with a range of different people in my area of research (which these days can also largely be achieved remotely – I think I wrote two papers with Lassi Liikkanen before I ever actually met him in person, for instance). 

Obviously, conferences are only one part of the PhD experience, and being successful in an academic career also requires a range of other skills in publishing high-quality research, teaching, public engagement, etc. But I do think conferences are an essential experience for getting a glimpse into how other people around the world engage with the same topics and challenges you do every day, providing inspiration for future research and collaborations, and helping you to become part of a vibrant and growing community of researchers with common interests and goals. 

Kelly Jakubowski

Advisor, SysMus Executive Committee

Durham University, UK

Welcome to the new SysMus website!

I have the great pleasure of writing the first blog of this lovely new SysMus website – thanks to Diana, Claudia and Jan for all their work in designing and populating it so beautifully! Along with a new structure, a new Executive Committee and a new website, we are launching a blog for the SysMus community, based right here! As a first post, I thought I would share a little bit about how we got here and what this new Executive Committee’s vision is for SysMus over the next few years.

As many of you know, the International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology – affectionately known as SysMus – was founded in 2008 by Manuela Marin and Richard Parncutt. It is not only a conference for students of systematic musicology and related disciplines, it is also a conference hosted by students of systematic musicology and related disciplines. This is quite unique in general, absolutely unique in the field of music research and one of the many reasons I love this conference series so much. A conference for students perfectly merges the exposure to established researchers through keynote addresses with the reduced pressure of meeting with peers, who always provide valuable feedback on your work. A conference by students gives interested graduate students the opportunity to host a quality, international academic conference before becoming a full-blown academic. Hosting is a lot of work, but with the right team, it’s also a blast!

SysMus19  will be hosted in Berlin this year, the 12th SysMus conference! I think this is such an amazing legacy that Manuela and Richard have left us – thank you! Year after year in venues around the world (though mostly Europe so far), SysMus has brought together students of music related research for three days of talks, keynotes, posters, and of course social time. Friendships were forged, collaborations blossomed and a community was built.

Now, before I tell you more about all the new stuff going on, I’ll tell you about how things used to work. As you know, SysMus is an annual conference. Hosts were found by word of mouth, with either Manuela reaching out to potential hosts or interested students contacting Manuela expressing an interest in hosting. Each host (chairperson) and their advisor became part of the SysMus Council, spear headed by Manuela, when their conference was over. The SysMus Council’s role was primarily to approve future hosts, and to be consulted on any important business to potentially affect the series. However, you can imagine that things can become increasingly inefficient as the size of the Council continuously grows year after year. So, at the 10 year mark, Manuela thought it might be time to check in to see how the community feels SysMus has been doing in the past 10 years, and where it might go in the future. Over the summer of 2017, a survey was circulated to all previous attendees to a SysMus conference to get an idea of the community’s thoughts on SysMus’s past and future. Results were presented at SysMus17, and can be found here.

While there was a need for more formality in the running of the series, there was not a strong enough desire or need for a formal association. Instead, we thought to create an Executive Committee in addition to the Council. The Exec would take care of day-to-day (more like, month-to-month) running of the series (new website then regular upkeep, social media, promotion of the series, finding hosts, etc.) while the Council would remain to be consulted on host selection and any other matters that may change the series. Joshua Bamford and myself worked with Manuela in consultation with the Council to create the SysMus Executive Committee Guidelines, a document outlining the aims and roles of the Exec and the election rules for those roles. We also re-confirmed who of the Council was still interested in serving, which left us with the members you see listed on the SysMus Council page. In October 2018, the Guidelines were approved and the search was on for an Exec! There was plenty of interest, which was very encouraging, and the SysMus Executive Committee is now composed of myself and Joshua Bamford Chair & Vice-Chair, Diana Kayser as Secretary, Jan Stupacher and Claudia Stirnat as Members-at-large and Kelly Jakubowski as Advisor. Our term will last until November 2020.

We have now met three times since we were elected and have discussed our aspirations for SysMus over the next few years (as well as actually taking action and getting things done, I promise!). Here are a couple of the key points we’d like to focus on as an Exec over the next two years:

1.       Academic quality. It is very important to us to maintain the academic quality of the SysMus conference and to even aim to increase the competitiveness of the conference to drive the quality higher. We and the SysMus community like the size and duration of the conference as it is, so our goal will be to increase submissions in order to increase competitiveness. We therefore aim to reach every continent for each conference across submissions, reviewers and presenters (in person or virtually).

a.       Publishing. We are also interested in promoting the work of early career researchers by approaching journals for special issues in relation to a SysMus conference, or simply by the SysMus community.

2.       Inclusivity. We also identified inclusivity as an important goal for us. We want to be inclusive of all individuals and embrace research from both the humanities and the sciences. One way we have identified to do this is to encourage gender balance in keynote speakers. Another is to aim for hosts to alternate between our three primary global regions (Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific) in a regular pattern. Yet another is to promote and make connections with other science-based organizations with similar goals (i.e. 500 Women Scientists)

3.       Centralization. As the history of SysMus grows, we aim to create databases or central resources for things like a list of labs around the world, organizing documents (i.e. budgets, schedules, etc.), a host guide, communications (email list, social media, etc.), data on conferences (submissions, attendance – in person and virtual, etc.). We are also developing a more formal host application process that we will begin next year as we look for a host for SysMus21.

4.       Community. We want to engage the SysMus community on a regular basis, outside of the conferences, mostly because not everyone can be in attendance. One way we are doing this is through this blog!

All of this being said, we are also committed to giving hosts free reign on how they want to host their conference. While we can provide guidance and support as well as some guidelines, the only two requirements are that there are keynote speakers and that proceedings be published. Beyond this, hosts are free to run the conference in the way they feel best.

So, now you know a little bit more about what the SysMus leadership looks like now, how we got here and where we’re going! As I mentioned, one of the main motivations of this new blog is to engage the larger SysMus community on a regular basis. We invite members of the community to contact us if you’d like to contribute. We invite posts presenting your own research, commenting/presenting others’ recent research, presentation of a particular methodological tool, discussion of a topic of your choice (online presence for researchers? Public engagement? Challenges? Successes?), etc.

This platform is yours!

Sarah

Chair, SysMus Executive Committee