So here we are! The first full day of the conference is now behind us, and the first thing to come to mind is that it is very hot in Greece! Luckily the conference venue is nicely air conditioned, and after a few days here the heat is a bit easier to take.
Scientifically the conference has had a great start, we had keynote presentations by Irène Deliège and John Rink already on Monday evening, and today a full day of presentations and posters.
There were no keynotes on the last morning. Sunday started with the ESCOM General Assembly instead. Professor Reinhard Kopiez from Hannover University was elected as the new president of ESCOM. The incumbent president, prof Jukka Louhivuori from Jyväskylä, was elected new secretary general and editor of Musicae Scientiae, the journal of ESCOM. Jukka will thus take over Irène Deliège’s duties. Or rather, a team of people, led by Jukka will take over Irène’s duties, and part of them (regarding the journal) will hopefully be outsourced to a publishing house. She has dedicated so much time and effort to ESCOM, running it and the journal, that it will take several people to fill her shoes.
After the assembly, we had a full day of sessions ahead of us. I skipped the first set, as I was bound to present our paper in the afternoon session. The paper was with Marc Thompson, and titled Group synchronization of coordinated movements in a cross-cultural choir workshop. We presented a preliminary analysis of a motion capture study we conducted last summer with the Emmanuel Lutheran Choir. I wrote about it here at that time.
Now, as a brief summary – we are all happy but very tired. It has been an intensive two weeks in Jyväskylä, with the ISSSCCM summer school and then the ESCOM 2009 conference. We have enjoyed it, organising these things is demanding but rewarding, and the best reward must be to see people talk to each other, excited about finding new people who share their research interests and able to trade knowledge with them. The debates, the arguments, presentations and questions, the dinners, parties and early morning coffees – all essential forms of interaction between researchers that can not be replaced with electronic and virtual forms of communication. This was our version of a show – looking forward to future conferences, collaborations, conversations.
Thanks for coming, thanks for reading. Let’s keep in touch!
The double-bill of keynotes in the morning of the 4th day consisted of Minna Huotilainen’s and Gary MacPherson’s talks.
Minna Huotilainen of the Helsinki-side of our Finnish Centre of Excellence presented methods and data of their studies on music perception in babies and toddlers. This research aims at mapping the development of music perception abilities by using neuroscientific methods, mostly EEG, and the event-related potentials (ERP) paradigm.
Studying brain responses of babies or toddlers is challenging, but potentially rewarding. Mapping how music-related processes develop in the maturing brain can tell us a lot about how the brain works and how music works in the brain. One of the difficulties is that for ERP-studies (that allow us to study time-locked brain responses to specific stimuli) is that for a good signal- to noise -ratio, the trials tend to get very long, especially if you want to test several features at once.
The idea here is to present repetitions of the standard stimulus, for instance a short melody, and then “oddballs”, melodies where a feature has been changed, or one aspect of the original violated – rhythm, melody, timbre, tuning etc. Then, brain responses to these changed stimuli are compared to the response to the standard, and so we can see which changes the brain is sensitive to. To test all these features, the experiment would be very long, but luckily the neuroscientists in Helsinki, led by prof Näätänen, have developed a multi-feature paradigm that is ideal for this purpose. In this paradigm, the stimulus (that the participant does not attend to, BTW, but it is presented in the background so that brains do the work without conscious efforts) is constructed to contain all these “violations” at a sequence, one at the time. So every iteration has a “violation” in one feature, but is “standard” with regards to the other features being tested. This means that the experiment can be much shorter, and that even younger kids can do it.
The result could probably be summarised in that babies have impressive capabilities for discriminating musical features. The group has compared those who like to sing at music playschool with those who tend not to be active singers, and also have constructed a study where 10-12 year old children who have music as their hobby were compared with a matched group who have other hobbies but don’t do music. This study showed benefits of musical training to attentive and perceptual tasks, compared to other non-musical hobbies. The differences were evident in for instance a language-related task of naming objects. The music-group responded faster and made fewer mistakes. At age 11, there were also differences in their ERP-responses to these stimuli, which were not there at the onset of training.
Minna Huotilainen also presented her theory on why music is so important in the first years of development. It is known that at that age the cortex is pretty much a work in progress, with very little connections between different parts of this part of brain. For the development of these cortico-cortical connections, it has been suggested that information input from the deeper areas of the brain is vital. Music is very good in activating those deeper parts, and perhaps this stimulation is beneficial for the development of connections in the cortex. She also speculated that the activity we measure in EEG or MEG from small childrens’ brains is actually originally activation of these deeper areas, projected through the cortex. This talk was full of very, very interesting stuff.
The second keynote was in the theme of music education, and given by professor Gary MacPherson, of University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His talk focused on motivation and its components in various stages of development. A good illustration of what music educators face every day was the clip from South Park, where the boys play Guitar Hero obsessively, because it is a game and very cool, but think that a real guitar is “gay”, and are not at all interested.
Another theme that has interested music education researchers is analysis of musical practice – especially the ration between effort and time versus the results. This has been shown to be a factor in how kids give up music, and it is also interesting how practice strategies differ. This theme was discussed in more detail in some other talks and posters in this conference.
MacPherson has been studying a young pianist, a child prodigy called Tiffany Poon. Again, what can we learn about one unusual case (think of Snowball) is perhaps debatable, but at least seeing a truly exceptional talent will make us rethink the rules and boundaries of human ability.
Since so many people were expected to leave the conference on the final day, the conference dinner/farewell party was scheduled for Saturday evening. Buses took the participants from their hotels to the venue, restaurant Rantasipi, Laajavuori. In addition to the dinner in good company, there were performances by Sinuhe, the Middle-Eastern/North African/Asian/eclectic band that is led by Pekka Toivanen from the Jyväskylä Music Department. There was also a short kantele concert and singing together. It was a nice party and the venue worked very well for this. There was this conference-fatique setting in in the evening, but we had one more day to go…
My updates in twitter and the blog posts are focused on keynotes. The reason isn’t that there aren’t so many other, interesting talks, but mainly because there is too much to report. The keynotes also cover the main fields of research represented in this conference, and therefore writing about them hopefully conveys a more complete picture of the goings-on of the event than writing about the talks that I go to.
Friday started with a keynote by professor Marc Leman, the director of IPEM at the university of Gent. His keynote had three sections. First, he stated the case of how music research is important for society. Music research can and should feed into the so-called cultural/creative sector, the size and importance of which is rising. And not only the economical importance, but also the impact for well-being, social cohesion etc.
This is linked to his ideas of what music research should be, as he stated that music research should try to become a proactive science – driving change instead of just trying to analyse it afterwards. Central to this idea is that music research should have applications that provide people (users) new possibilities to interact with music. Interacting with music could happen through musical interfaces, new instruments, controllers etc. In Marc Leman’s view, musicology is a study of humans interacting with music.
Marc is one of the central figures in the field of systematic musicology, and in his keynote he discussed the philosophical basis and mapped out a future for this discipline. There has been a lot of discussion about labels. Whether what we do should be called cognitive or systematic musicology or something else. The umbrella-term “musicology” seems a bit too vague, as there are very different things done underneath it – historical and ethnomusicology, for example, in addition to the more “music & science” -related stuff. A number of terms, such as interdisciplinary musicology etc. have been used recently. In the discussion, many members of the audience expressed the wish that we should stop dividing our field with these labels, because they seem to stand in the way of collaboration between these subfields and niches. David Huron spoke of the importance of such collaboration in his keynote on the first day.
Finally, Marc Leman presented examples of some of the work they have done on embodied cognition. They have built a number of new interfaces, games and systems, that can be used not only for studying musical behaviours, but also for interacting with music in a fun and engaging way. They have been demonstrating these systems n science fairs and such, and received a lot of attention. Music is fun, and new (often more inclusive or game-like) ways of engaging with it seem to be fun, as well.
Award-ceremony
At the end of the keynote session, professor Graham Welch, the chairperson of SEMPRE gave out the lifetime achievement award for the founder and retiring secretary general of ESCOM, prof Irène Deliege. She has also been the editor of Musicae Scientiae since its conception. The society we have today and the journal are results of her devotion and relentless efforts.
It seems that as the evenings are about socialising, the time for these daily posts is morning. This hopefully means that what I write is better because it has been filtered through one night of sleep, but it could of course only mean that these are already out-of-date.
The second day started with two keynote addresses. The first was a shared presentation by Lars Ole Bonde and Tony Wigram, two music therapists who have been central in establishing music therapy as an evidence-based discipline. They have been involved in a number of studies that adhere to the strict standards of medical research and review. Their talk was on Music Dynamics and Emotion in Therapy: Theory and Applied Research.
For a morning session starting at 8.30, their topic was a dangerous one. They played a lot of examples of relaxing music and even asked people to close their eyes and sit back while listening to it… I didn’t dare, because I think I would have fallen asleep, due to not sleeping so much during the night. 
The second keynote was by Dr. Aniruddh Patel and his topic was Music, Neuroscience and Evolution. There’s a lot of debate on the evolutionary origins of music, mainly on whether music is an evolutionary adaptation or not. Like all debates, this has been polarised to two opposing views. According to one, music is biologically important, it is selected for in evolution. The other, perhaps epitomized in Steven Pinker’s formulation of it being auditory cheesecake, it is biologically unimportant, and just something we do, purely for pleasure.
Ani’s approach was to step back and look at this debate and this phenomenon from a neural (and perhaps neutral) point of view. I liked his approach, that we should start with the null hypothesis that music is NOT an evolutionary adaptation. He says that for language we can reject such a hypothesis, but that he is not prepared to do so with music.
As evidence, he offered findings from neuroscience that seemed to suggest that while there are also indications that music and language, for instance, are in some ways independent in the brains (there are stroke victims, for instance, that have lost one ability while preserving the other), he argued that the core functions, such as syntax processing in both music and language are shared.
He discussed tonality and entrainment as examples of processes that underlie music. As I said in the tweets yesterday, I don’t quite agree with his reasoning. Or, I agree with the logic, but not the conclusions, and this is because I have a somewhat different interpretation of the results of the research that he presented. There are a number of problems, but mainly I think that for these neuroscientific studies, massively complex phenomena, like “music”, are reduced to impoverished, one-dimensional, artificial projections, in order to be able to conduct research within the tight constraints of neuroimaging, for instance.
So, the evidence applies to certain aspects of musical abilities, but while looking at these parts, I think he was missing the whole.
Also, what I missed in the talk was a more profound analysis of what music is for, what are its functions. This is of course a key issue when discussing whether music has a biological purpose. Currently, there is a gap between what music does in the world, and what it is studied as in the laboratories. Music is a social activity, a means of communication, a vehicle for emotions, and playground, source of solace and an art form, pleasure technology and a number of other things. I agree that in order to study it, we need to break it into parts, we need to look for brain correlates of those parts and do reductions and projections in order to make sense of the complex phenomenon. I identify myself as a scientist, and am willing to contort music to fit my experimental designs. However, one has to be careful when drawing conclusions about things such as universality (see David Huron’s talk yesterday) and especially when all the evidence comes from within one musical culture.
I did like the way in which he demolished the false dichotomy where cognitive faculties are either innate and biologically important or learned and biologically insignificant. He says that music is a transformational tool that is invented, learned, just like fire use, but as it shapes the brain, it is also biologically important, but only ontogenetically, not phylogenetically. While it is good to remember that the question of nature or nurture is not dichotomous, I’m not sure if what he says about transformational tools fits to music (or, of course depends how you define music). However, saying “music” is invented is in conflict with evidence from developmental studies and how first interaction between newborn babies and their caregivers is “musical” in nature, for example.
But, with all this criticism, I must say that Ani Patel has the talent for clear argumentation. He can explain things and bring clarity to issues that are otherwise murky and difficult to understand. The experiments themselves are of very high quality and I think Patel’s SSIRH-model has a lot of attractive qualities, and could well be that the syntax-engine in the brain is shared by language and music – the problem of course being, what syntax is. This is not as clear for music as it might be for language.
Patel’s keynote did the job of a keynote very well – it started a discussion and I’m sure his way of structuring the argumentation will be influential. I hope he continues to work with these questions.
The conference started! The 300+ participants from 35 countries have arrived, the keynotes, spoken papers and poster sessions are now on the way.
The first keynote was given by professor David Huron. He talked about how important it would be for the cognitive scientists and ethnomusicologists to work together. There are many reasons why these two groups of researchers are often each others’ harshest critics, the main one being the difference in points of view: cognitive scientists are in search for universals, while many ethnomusicologists work within the postmodern “paradigm” with an emphasis on the uniqueness of each musical culture. And while ethnomusicologists might exaggerate the differences, they have strong and often justified scepticism towards cognitive musicologists’ claims that their findings, obtained by testing small groups of Western undergraduates, are universally true.
I tweeted Huron’s suggestions yesterday. Here’s a quick recap (the headings are Huron’s, the formulation of the explanations are mine, as I try to remember what prof Huron said…)
1) Don’t claim the truth
- there might not be one, and your’s is not the only one (we don’t do physics, and even their truths change)
2) Broaden your audience
- try to talk to those who disagree
3) Narrow your claims
- every sample is a convenience sample, and as cultures differ, claims of universality are very dangerous.
4) Don’t confuse universal with innate
- behaviours are complex interactions between individuals and environment. Nature via nurture, as Matt Ridley would put it.
5) Seek both difference and similarity.
- as Huron pointed out, “it’s not research if you don’t invite failure”. This is the key point in Popper’s idea of falsificationism as a scientific philosophy.
6) Acknowledge the limitations of cross-cultural comparisons.
- we do most of our cognitive work within the so-called Western cultures. Occasionally, when cross-cultural research is done, one or two other cultures are involved. Finding similarities in such a study does not, however, constitute compelling evidence for universality. There are more than 4 cultures out there.
7) Aim to collaborate (even if you can’t find a collaborator)
- this of course requires that we all talk with each other more, across disciplines, and accept that there is more than one way to do good research.
8 ) Travel broadens the mind
- a good inoculation against thinking everyone’s like me is to go to places to see they aren’t.
I’ll try to post daily, every evening, but as yesterday evening I had the pleasure to host my old colleagues from Cambridge, this post was delayed till next morning. I’m currently contemplating Aniruddh Patel’s keynote on music and evolution, and will post my thoughts later. This was a true conversation starter as a presentation, and I hope there will be some here in this blog, as well.
The seventh triennial conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, or ESCOM2009 started today in Jyväskylä. We’ve got approximately 300 international guests, and 5 days of talks and networking ahead of us.
The conference delegates are now gathered at the Martti Ahtisaari -hall of the University of Jyväskylä. The first keynote of the conference is on the way, by professor David Huron of Ohio State University.
I’ll be tweeting from the conference using the hash tag #ESCOM, so tune in, and chime in, if you are around/interested. The proceedings can be found online here. The conference website has a lot of information, including the conference program.
