Keynotes
Nori Jacoby
Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt
Focusing primarily on the auditory modality, Nori Jacoby’s research explores latent perceptual representation using computational and behavioural methods. He currently directs the "Computational Auditory Perception" research group at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. Before coming to Frankfurt, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University (Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience), MIT (McDermott Computational Audition Lab) and UC Berkeley (Griffiths Computational Cognitive Science Lab). He completed his Ph.D. At the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Naftali Tishby and Merav Ahissar. His research has been published in journals including Current Biology, Nature, Nature Scientific Reports, Philosophical Transactions B, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Vision, and the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
Keynote title: Universality and cross-cultural variation in mental representations of music revealed by global comparison of rhythm priors
Abstract: Music is present in every known society, yet varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to the perception of music? This question has remained unanswered because previous cross-cultural experiments have compared only small numbers of cultures. We measured mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries across 5 continents, spanning urban societies, indigenous populations, and online participants. Listeners reproduced random seed rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of “telephone”), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer ratio rhythms. However, the occurrence and relative importance of individual integer ratio categories varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. By contrast, university students and online participants in non-Western countries tended to resemble Western participants, underrepresenting the variability otherwise evident across cultures. Our results provide evidence for a universal feature of music perception – discrete rhythm “categories'' at small integer ratios. These discrete representations likely help to stabilize musical systems in the face of cultural transmission, but interact with culture-specific traditions to yield diversity that is evident when perception is probed at a global scale.
Jonna Vuoskoski
Associate Professor of Music Cognition at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she is a core member of the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion, and the leader of the Interaction and Pleasure research cluster.
Jonna Vuoskoski received her doctorate from the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) in 2012, and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Oxford and the University of Jyväskylä. Her main areas of interest are music-induced emotion, empathy, and the social and embodied cognition of music. Currently she is working on a project investigating the role of entrainment and experiences of ‘being moved’ in the pro-social effects of music.
Keynote title: The social dimension of music cognition
Abstract: Music is an inherently social phenomenon. Even when we listen to music in solitude, social cognitive processes play an important role in shaping our perception and experience. Building on recent empirical evidence, I will argue that the social dimension of music cognition may be even more important than previously recognized. Through empirical examples, I will demonstrate how listeners make social evaluations on the basis of musical information, how feeling moved by music is associated with appraisals and experiences of connectedness, and how empathy contributes to embodiment of both emotional and rhythmic aspects of music.
Peter Vuust
Director of Center for Music In the Brain (MIB)
Peter Vuust is a unique combination of a renowned scientist and a world class musician. As a researcher, he is Denmark’s leading expert in the field of music and the brain. He is internationally recognised, widely quoted and received in October 2014 the Danish National Research Foundation’s centre grant of DKK 52 million to found the Center for Music In the Brain.
He is the embodiment of multidisciplinarity with his academic background as a PhD in Neuroscience and MSc. in Mathematics, French and Music. This is combined with an exceptional career as a musician playing and recording with international jazz stars, such as Lars Jansson, Tim Hagans, John Abercrombie and Jukkis Uotila, and his appearance on more than 100 records, 6 of these as band leader earning him the “Gaffel Prize” from the Danish Jazz Society in 2008 and a Danish Music Award nomination in 2014 for his album September song with his own quartet and Veronica Mortensen.