Past CMS Seminars

We live in an exciting time where the abundance of digital media and advanced computational tools, such as machine learning, enables the study of music and culture on an unprecedented scale. What people listen to across different regions, communities, and historical periods offers valuable insights into understanding how...

Being a performing musician is rewarding but can also be challenging. Many musicians face various obstacles in their journeys including low confidence, performance anxiety, and performance-related pain, to name a few. My primary goal as a researcher is to support musicians through such challenges, and I believe that...

From tingling spines triggered by tonal patterns to tearful eyes provoked by arrangements of colours and shapes, humans can have remarkable experiences. But what makes individuals susceptible to such aesthetic responses? Here, I present evidence that genetic effects are partly responsible. Triangulating evidence from twin...

In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on...

Musical notation in South Asia has historically been associated with pedagogy and music theory. The earliest surviving example is a 7th-century rock inscription at Kuḍumiyāmalai, in South India, recording seven extended melodies in seven different modes. With a total of some 2,400 musical notes, this source is considerably...

This presentation discusses the potential use of an incidental learning procedure for acquiring music information. The research investigates humans’ ability to capture the relationship between two events in the environment, aiming to investigate whether or not this human ability can be applied to skills normally considered...

To what extent and in what ways do participants who just made music together understand what they were doing in the same way? In this talk, I’ll explore this question drawing on case studies in a range of music making contexts: improvisation on a jazz standard, free improvisation, and a classical duo. In these case studies...

Multiple approaches have been used to investigate how musical cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The most prominent approach is a systematic manipulation approach (Eerola, Friberg, & Bresin, 2013; Scherer & Oshinsky, 1977), where similar musical excerpts are created by slightly varying cue levels...

Wing et al (2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.1125 ) proposed that phase correction underlies ensemble timing in classic quartet playing. Each player corrects the timing of their next note in proportion to the summed weighted asynchronies of their previous note onset with the note onsets of the other three players...