The fourth SysMus Interview was conducted with Prof. Tuomas Eerola in November 2015. Eerola obtained his MA degree in musicology at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) in 1997. His pre-doctoral work involved periods of study at Leicester University (UK) and Cornell University (USA). In 2003, he finished his PhD at University of Jyväskylä in musicology (music cognition). In 2003-2006, he worked as postdoctoral researcher at the same institution, followed by a postdoctoral position at an EU Project (Tuning the Brain for Music). Since 2007, he has held a professorship at the the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), first associated with Music, Mind & Technology MA programme and later as a Chair of Musicology. Eerola is also affiliated with the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research. In 2013, he moved to UK where he is now Professor of Music cognition/Empirical Musicology at the University of Durham.
The interview was conducted by Andrew Goldman, PhD, who is a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, USA.
AG (Andrew Goldman): What motivates you to conduct research in systematic musicology? What excites you about the field?
TE (Tuomas Eerola): For me, the motivation for researchin general lies in the discovery of new things, ideas, results, and possibilities. Pertaining to systematic musicology, I often get motivated by hearing how ethnomusicologists, performers, music historians or music theorists talk about their topics. In such situations, I wonder why does a particular behaviour/musical device/situation arise in that particular context, does it involve a more generic musical process, and could it be captured by empirical means. The most exciting aspect of this field is that people with the mindset of systematic musicology have open and flexible attitudes towards music and everything involving scholarly research about it. Therefore a room full of systematic musicologists can plan a study of the employment prospects of music scholars, or whether primates and humans share timekeeping processes, or is there a way to track how YouTube changes the music consumption habits of young people. In my opinion, such an omnivorous appetite for discovery coupled with good methods make the field quite special and appealing.
AG: In what ways, if any, are personal musical experiences as a performer or listener necessary to conduct systematic musicological research? Are such experiences ever unhelpful?
TE: I don’t think you would have the same intuition and drive for pursuing many of the questions within the field without any personal experiences as a performer, and all the systematic musicologists I know have these credentials at some level. Having said that, I don’t really routinely explicitly draw on my experiences as a clarinet player since I don’t study topics that would be especially close to performance, but I find that I do draw from my listening experiences (in concerts or elsewhere) often where I think of a particular issue relating to my research interests (e.g., emotions). Personal experiences are probably not unhelpful in research since we can all take that perspective quite easily (we all are, after all, music consumers and listeners besides ex-performers). The only hindrance that I can think of is that you might be uncritical of the “power of music” since you yourself have found it such a potent medium. There are of course a lot of other people out there who do not hold similar beliefs about music or have no interest in spending any time with it. In music research, sometimes you see research designs and interpretations that reflect overconfident belief in the great properties and effects of music on people, and one wishes that we would remember to think that other arts, activities and hobbies might often deliver similar benefits attributed to music.
AG: How has the field of systematic musicology changed since you were a student, and what new challenges or opportunities face students today?
TE: There are two main changes that I recognise. Technology, which has changed both the music consumption and research methods, and proliferation of disciplines and associated areas. When I studied “cognitive musicology”, as it was called in the early nineties at Jyväskylä, Finland, the focus was on studying how we process music—any type of music. Music itself was found in the recordings and live concerts, but research had to be constrained to symbolic domain since audio was difficult to analyse in a musically sophisticated fashion, and there were no large music corpora available nor tools to analyse them. We actually created some of these concerning Finnish folk melodies and tools to analyse MIDI files after the turn of the millennium as David Huron had already shown the way with Humdrum tools. There were some relevant pieces of technology, such as MIDI, computers for the analyses, but now the technology has become much more important part of the music consumption itself with streaming music services, recommendations systems and smart players. Students of today routinely get training on audio analysis (e.g. Sonic visualiser) and can access truly large datasets of symbolic and audio music, so the possibilities are greater. The other change, burgeoning related areas and disciplines such as MIR (Music Information Retrieval) or cognitive ethnomusicology or neuroscience and music are much more closer to the questions that systematic musicologists want to be asking. The dilemma facing the new students of this area is that one should know the basics of all these areas in order to realise what can and has been achieved within the fields, but gaining expertise in any of these related areas requires tremendous effort and might take away from something else. So choosing what palette of background knowledge, methods, and techniques to obtain is a true challenge for any current student of systematic musicology.
AG: There seems to be a trend today in scholarship towards interdisciplinary. Arguably, systematic musicology is necessarily interdisciplinary.Where do you see this is going in the future? What new collaborations do you foresee?
TE: True, it would be odd to be against interdisciplinary research in systematic musicology since it is almost the hallmark of the field. However, if the field itself attempts to cover numerous disciplines, knowing what is the core content, knowledge, methods, and resources, is quite difficult and might lead to fragmentation of the field. For this reason, interdisciplinary research such as systematic musicology comes with a price; it is more difficult to obtain the required core skills if the goal posts for this are difficult to pin down due to interdisciplinary nature of the field. Also, genuine interdisciplinary research is actually quite challenging, slow and arduous. You need to understand the disciplinary-specific jargon, be able to appreciate the different values and ontological assumptions within the disciplines, and to readjust the way research is communicated in each discipline. And although interdisciplinary research is appreciated in many ways, such efforts quite often face challenges in journals (which are more or less unidisciplinary), funding bodies (systematic musicology might get funding from humanities, social sciences, and sciences), and departments (which are organised under schools and faculties and tend to have a core disciplines in most countries). I’m sure there will be more collaborations with rehabilitation and health-related fields but I would also like to see systematic musicology having an impact on traditional areas of musicology (music history, analysis, theory, performance and composition) by bringing insights from social sciences and technology.
AG: In what ways do you foresee systematic musicology helping to create future technology?
TE: What a great question! I’m a little bit unsure whether systematic musicology can feed the creative performance practices already exploring new musical interfaces or music business that already uses deep learning and other state-of-the-art tools to perfect personalised recommendation and discovery systems for tens of millions of customers. However, perhaps the potential lies in providing better understanding of the fundamental questions in music such as how do we recognise music (how we determine melodic, rhythmic or timbral similarity), what music does to us at an individual (e.g., attention, emotion, mood regulation, rehabilitation) and collective level (e.g., social bonding, identity, cultural values, and communication). Rehabilitation and education seem to be the current themes to which music is assumed to have a positive contribution to. Since these have been mentioned in most grant applications and discussion sections of the papers of systematic musicology since the 1990s, I don’t think their importance as the societal motivators will diminish over the next 20 years. It would be exciting to think of completely new future technologies (biofeedback and music, sonification of non-musical data, …).
AG: What questions about music is systematic musicology unable to answer in principle? What questions are unanswerable in practice, but may be approachable in the future?
TE: There are a lot practical constraints inherent in technology and research methods and access to people and their experiences in different situations and cultures. For technology, even though MIR is taking great strides at the moment, we still have a rather rudimentary grasp of how high-level musical concepts may be reliably extracted from audio. Also, despite the huge audio collections and companies sharing partial data from millions of tracks and users, the copyright issues prevent us from effectively carrying out research on these. Probing the fundamentals of music across cultures is becoming more difficult, at least if you wish to find populations not exposed to Western music. Of course, there will be exciting prospects opening up as the neuroscience methods develop, and when the biomedical understanding of genes and state-driven biological markers is at a level where they can be connected to our predispositions to music and how music making or music listening changes the intricate homeostasis within our bodies.
AG: If you were not primarily researching music, what other academic topics would you be most interested to study and why?
TE: I’m tempted to say that engineering would be close to my heart, although I’m not sure about the exact type of engineering I’d like to do, but it would be very satisfying in creating and building systems (software or physical) that do something of practical value. A loftier topic would be medical research, particularly the common yet mysterious conditions such as Type I Diabetes or Alzheimers, which also have great personal relevance for me.