New paper: word rhythm entrainment in a story-telling game

This picture depicts the relative timing of the pairs’ words. In the absence of any influence from the partner, the distribution would follow the red dashed line. Instead, the distribution is strongly concentrated on 180 degrees, which means the partners are in anti-phase entrainment – the words of one occur close to half way between the words of the other.

It’s always a nice milestone to get a paper published. We reached one today as our paper in Frontiers in Psychology – Language Sciences was published. Our paper is part of a very interesting Research Topic, Turn-taking in Human Communicative Interaction.

Attending and neglecting people

The International Association for the Study of Attention and Performance has organised a bi-annual meeting since 1966, and the newest edition of this series started today in Tuusula, Finland. This year’s conference is themed “Attending and neglecting people”, and as always, it is a small meeting with hand-picked invited speakers, plenty of time for discussion and networking. 

Communication in a string quartet

As I mentioned in the earlier post from the International Symposium on Performance Science, string quartets seem to be fashionable in music psychology, and for good reasons. They are perhaps the prototype of a chamber music ensemble, with lots of great pieces written for them, they are of an optimal size for such studies, and of course there are many professional quartets that have worked together for years, making them extremely interesting topics for research on coordination and interaction. A new study from Genoa looks at communication in a string quartet, using a cool setup.

Synchronisation and schnitzels – International Symposium on Performance Science

The fourth international symposium on performance science (ISPS for short) convened in Vienna at the University of Music and Performing Arts. The theme for this four day meeting was “Performing together”, which of course fits my research interests perfectly. So, I gave two talks but was mainly looking forward to hearing what the “state of the art” in ensemble research and joint action, entrainment etc. is.

Mosh pit dynamics

From The Met to Mardi Gras, Glastonbury to Concertgebouw, music syncs groups of people together. Getting people moving together and feeling e.g. joy, sublimity or nostalgia together is one of many virtues of music (of course, you can also see it as a vice if you look at how music is used in preparation for battle or as a propaganda tool).

Rhythmic entrainment – in animals?

Greetings from the ICMPC10 in Sapporo! This is the biggest gathering of music cognition researchers and takes place every other year. It’s always great to meet old friends, make new ones, and hear about the newest developments in the field. In the multi-disciplinary field of music cognition, these conferences are important also for the international collaborations that are quickly becoming the default way of doing research.

The great thing about the ICMPC is that it brings together very different researchers and covers a wide variety of themes and questions. One of the fields where a lot of buzz has been created recently is the study of animal cognition and especially components of “musicality” in animals.