August 19, 2010
Of music and the mind: Conference for Music Perception and Cognition at UW this month
What’s the evolutionary purpose behind music? What are the benefits of musical engagement for infants or people with neurological disorders? How does visual information affect the way we hear music?
Scores of the world’s leading scholars and scientists in the area of music cognition and perception will gather at the UW this month to take up these questions and a lot more at the weeklong 11th annual International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition. The conference will be held on campus Aug. 23-27.
“It is the conference for music psychology,” said Steven Demorest, UW professor of music education and the conference organizer. “It’s the largest one devoted to that topic and certainly the oldest one devoted to that topic.”
The conference will include more than 400 presentations on topics involving the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience as well as music theory and music education. There will be two keynote talks. The first will be by Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, who studies the neurobiology of music perception and uses music as a tool to foster a deeper understanding of the workings of the brain. Schlaug’s keynote will be titled Singing: When it Hurts, When it Helps, and When it Changes Brains.
A second keynote will be delivered by Petri Toiviainen, professor of music at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland and who heads the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music. Toiviainen will speak on Spatiotemporal Music Cognition.
Demorest said, “We are just beginning to understand the immense potential of music to enhance lives, improve health and increase our understanding of the human brain.” He added, “There has been an explosion of research in this area in the last decade or so. And even with this increased activity, the study of music perception and cognition is a relatively new field compared to research in areas such as language or visual perception. There are new findings all the time regarding how music shapes the developing brain and how musical thought and behavior relate to cognition in other domains.”
UW faculty from music, psychology and speech and hearing will take part, as well as graduate students from across campus. Joining Demorest from the music education faculty will be Professor Patricia Campbell and Associate Professor Steven Morrison. Ellen Covey, professor of psychology, and Lynne Werner, professor of speech and hearing sciences, also will be on hand. Affiliate music faculty member Ellen Dissanayake also will participate, leading an invited symposium on the topic, How the Hypothesis Lost Its Spots: Some Considerations When Formulating Arguments About the Evolutionary Origin and Function of Music.
Ward Drennan, a lecturer in otolaryngology, also will present on Music Perception in Cochlear Implant Users, joined by Grace Liu Nimmons, Robert Kang, Jillian Crosson, Jong Ho Won and Jay Rubinstein.
With three large poster sessions and five days of symposia and paper presentations, the weeklong gathering is, as Demorest said, “truly a conference where people with diverse research interests come together to hear what the others are working on.”
Demorest wrote in notes to participants of the upcoming conference, “Where else can psychologists, educators, theorists, therapists, performers, computer scientists, ethnomusicologists and neuroscientists come together in one place to share the progress of the research being conducted in their respective disciplines?”?
Learn more about the conference online at its website.
