Australian Music & Psychology Society
December, 2017
Edition 9
Australian Music & Psychology Society Newsletter Silly Season Special It has been a longstanding tradition (since last year) to devote our December issue to some research that may have originated somewhere out in left field. We’re certainly not ones to break with tradition, so here we are again. 2017 also happens to be an AMPS conference year, so hopefully many of you are reading this in Brisbane, perhaps over lunch with some colleagues you haven’t seen since the last conference. Hopefully it starts a conversation, or maybe it provides a good distraction in those afternoon sessions when you’re dozing off a bit. (If I catch you reading during my talk on Thursday afternoon I won’t hold it against you.) Either way, we hope you enjoy it! In this issue you’ll find a great collection of reviews from recent conferences and publications, as well a special treat at the end. Amanda Krause gives us a round up of the recent conference in Melbourne on Peace, Music and Conciliation through Music, which I had the good fortune to attend as well and can say it was a wonderful event. Anna Fiveash (one of our editorial team who has recently relocated to France) then finds some similarities between whale song, bird song and jazz. Rebecca Gelding had a sit down with Amanda Krause to talk about our favourite playlists (with a bit of a Christmas twist), then I sat down with Rebecca Gelding to talk about her work. There’s also a little piece in there about how people perceive randomness, and the implications for chance music, if that’s your cup of tea. Finally, if you’re looking for Christmas presents for any Spanish speaking friends, perhaps Marc Serra i Griera could recommend a book. Be sure to check the last two pages for a visual summary of all three AMPS conferences to date. It’s fascinating to see how the themes have developed over time, and there is quite possibly some more we could do with that data to understand the development of Music Psychology in Australia. Let us know if you have any ideas!
Next issue…
Inside this issue More random than chance ......... 2 Conference Review: Peace and Music Collaboratory .............................. 3 Article Summary: Structure in music and animal vocalisations............. 4 Christmas playlists ...................... 6 5 minutes with............................ 7 Book Review: Is music a distraction? ................................................... 8 Visions of AMPS conferences ..... 10
Calendar of events • 19th of February, 2018. Articles for AMPS newsletter due. Submissions should be between 500 and 1000 words and may report original research, opinion or summary of others’ research. Submissions to: editors.AMPS@gmail.com
We’ll all be taking a much needed break over Christmas and New Year, but the newsletter will be back in March to continue as a quarterly publication next year. As always, you can contact us at editors.AMPS@gmail.com to pitch (or pre-register, if you prefer) an idea for an article to us. This way we can be sure to reserve space for you. We would also welcome any short responses or commentary arising from this current issue. It’s always nice to see some discussion arise from the content of the newsletter. Comments are always most welcome on Twitter and Facebook as well. We look forward to hearing from you!
Editorial team
Fröhliche Weihnachten, hyvää joulua, and merry Christmas!
Previous AMPS Newsletters can be found at https://issuu.com/ ausmuspsysoc
Joshua S. Bamford
Joshua Bamford, Anna Fiveash, Rebecca Gelding, Solange Glasser, James Richmond.
For more about AMPS, find us on social media!
More random than chance Joshua S. Bamford (University of Oxford) joshua@bamford.id.au
Western Art Music history was certainly not my strength during my undergraduate studies, and was the only subject I’ve ever had to repeat. My least favourite part was the listening exam, in which we would be played a musical excerpt, and then have to regurgitate a list of facts about the piece. I was terrible at remembering dates of compositions and, to my then uneducated ear, sometimes the music all sounded the same. 20th Century Modernism posed a particular hurdle, when it came to chance and serial music. In an effort to demonstrate that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t tell these apart, I designed an experiment.
it. There is a strong tendency to equate “random” with “equally distributed,” particularly when it comes to independent random events. In a classic experiment, participants were asked to invent and write out a random sequence of coin flips, but people consistently overestimated how many reversals there would be, tending to alternate between “heads, tails, heads, tails” more often than would be expected in a true sequence of random coin flips (Ladouceur et al., 1996). There is also a tendency to perceive any events that we don’t understand as random (Falk & Konold, 1997). Could these same principles be applied to chance music?
For those who are yet to complete their trainI set out to test whething in the history of er people could tell Western Art Music, the difference bechance and serial comtween chance and seripositional techniques al music, in a percepth arose in the mid-20 tion experiment. For Century with the aim of this, I composed 16 subverting traditional tone-rows according musical structures, or in to the 12-tone method some cases to raise philensuring no note was osophical questions repeated, and let the about the nature of murandi() function in sical composition itself. In chaos theory, a system may appear random, while simply being MATLAB compose 16 Serialism relies on quite too complex to understand. Thus randomness may be either in the melodies by chance. All strict structures, and is process, or merely a product of perception. stimuli were 12 notes highly systematic, alt- (Photo credit, Wikipedia) long, with equal note hough these are mostly durations, and realised incompatible with traditional tonal harmony; the most by a MIDI piano. Participants were then presented ranobvious example being Schoenberg’s 12 tone row meth- dom pairings of these stimuli in a forced choice task, in od in which all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are ar- which they were asked which of the two stimuli soundranged in a specific order, with no note sounding twice ed more “random”. until the whole row has been played, thus avoiding any assertion of a tonal centre. Chance music is, in terms of Unsurprisingly, most participants were terrible at this, process, the polar opposite of highly structured serial- with nearly all scoring worse than chance level, indiism, in that it relies upon random events to determine cating that they weren’t just guessing, but would tend elements of the musical composition. However, the to choose the 12-tone rows as the most “random” stimproduct of both processes may end up sounding re- ulus. This is quite possibly because a 12-tone row markably similar. sounds more evenly distributed that 12 random notes and, as seen in previous experiments, people tend to Interestingly, we can draw upon some existing psychol- have a bias towards thinking random sequences should ogy theories to explain this. People are generally very be more evenly distributed than they are. bad at correctly identifying randomness when they see
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One of the defining features of the 12-tone technique is that there are no repetitions within a row. However, looking at the stimuli that were kindly provided by MATLAB, truly random events may incidentally involve a lot of repetition. In fact, we can use a formula developed for the Birthday Problem (originally used to determine the probability of two people at a party sharing a birthday, which is actually surprisingly high) in order to determine the probability that any note in a sequence of 12 notes, composed using the notes of the Chromatic scale, will be repeated. That formula would tell us that there is a 99.9% probability of at least one repeated. As Schoenberg knew, repetition of notes may lead to the rise of a tonal centre to the listener’s ear. Although, he may not have realised that if there are no tonal structures that can be understood by a listener raised on tonal harmony, then the listener may perceive the music as being “random”. So what does this mean for the success of these experiments in musical composition? Of course, this little study used very controlled stimuli, and 12-tone rows are meant to be presented as part of a larger structure, using various means of transformation, however other researchers have questioned whether these greater structures are perceived by an audience (Raffman, 2003). At the very least, modernist composers have provided some highly valuable testing ground for the na-
ture of music perception, by pushing the barriers of what we would consider music. It’s also interesting to find some parallels between the perception of randomness in sound and general studies into the perception of randomness, suggesting that there are probably common mechanisms at play. However, if there are any composers out there who are looking to make music that sounds truly random, I would recommend avoiding random methods such as dice, and borrowing some ideas from 12-tone serialism. I now also have an excuse for why I did so poorly in that listening test on 20th Century modernism, back in 2nd year uni. This study was presented at the recent International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus17) in London. Proceedings available here: https://sysmus17.qmul.ac.uk/proceedings/ References Falk, R. and Konold, C. (1997). Making sense of randomness: implicit encoding as a basis for judgment. Psychological Review, 104(2), 301-318. Raffman, D. (2003). Is twelve-tone music artistically defective? Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 27(1), 69-87. Ladouceur, R., Paquet, C. and Dube, D. (1996). Erroneous Perceptions in generating sequences of random events. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26(24), 2157-2166.
Conference Reflection:
Peace, Empathy and Conciliation Through Music Amanda E. Krause (University of Melbourne) amanda.krause@unimelb.edu.au
Hosted by Samantha Dieckmann and Jane Davidson, the Peace, Empathy and Conciliation Through Music collaboratory brought together researchers, arts practitioners, and community members for a brilliant two days in September. A vibrant program filled with keynotes [by Laura Hassler (from Musicians Without Borders), Kathryn Marsh (University of Sydney) and Brydie-Leigh Bartleet (Griffith University)], workshops, and presentations prompted lively discussion amongst the participants. As I was chairing sessions both days, I had the opportunity to listen to a lot of great presentations (although I had to miss out on the other streams!). It was nice to see a mixture of research- and practitionerfocused presentations. Selected highlights: • In the Music Therapy session block, the presenters discussed both theory and practice concerning empathy and peace. Minky van der Walt focused on how people need to be able to feel safe in music therapy in order to process emotions, including sad-
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ness and anger. Indeed, discussions of the “sense of safety” as a necessary, foundational feature of projects weaved through a number of talks across the two days. A full afternoon on day 1 of talks on community and church choirs: Conference organiser, Samantha Dieckmann, spoke about her lullaby choir project and how the participants are navigating languages and practices to share and bond interculturally. Anja Tahane spoke about the Mullum Mullum choir, with choir member Aunty Lucia Baulich, who provided her personal experience of the benefits she perceives the choir affords. Both the practitioner and participant experiences shared reiterated recent research supporting the vast health and well-being benefits for both individuals and communities through musicmaking. Day 2’s ‘Composing for peace’ session concerned experiences related to different pieces/ performances:
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Upcoming Conferences Musical Affects (AMPS-ICME), Brisbane, Australia, 7-9 December, 2017. Together in Music Conference, York, United Kingdom, 12-14 April, 2018. 5th International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music, Thessaloniki, Greece, 26-29 June, 2018.
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Timbre is a Many-Splendored Thing, Montreal, Canada, 5-7 July, 2018. International Society for Music Education (ISME) World Conference, Baku, Azerbaijan, 1520 July, 2018. ICMPC15-ESCOM10, Graz/ Montreal/Sydney, 23-28 July, 2018.
Join the conversation! It’s nice to think that this newsletter might spark some discussion later. Don’t hesitate to jump on Twitter and send your thoughts to @AusMusPsySoc and #musicscience or post in our Facebook group.
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Ros Dunlop opened the session by discussing and then performing Wesley-Smith’s X on clarinet for the audience; and David Leha closed the session by performing some of his songs in language. Both performances enacted the collaboratory themes and left the audience in awed, reflective silence. Kathryn Marsh explored the ways in which music can contribute to social synchrony and reminded us that the UN’s first listed strategy for building cohesion is engagement with the arts. Brydie-Leigh Bartleet explored the importance of trust, respect, and dialogue in intercultural music practices. Both Kathryn and Brydie shared examples of collaborative music-making activities from their research work. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also highlight the amazing music performed by Suso Jazz Trio at the conference dinner. Everyone couldn’t help but get up out of their seats for a dance!
There was mention of how music can both divide and bring people together, but that we must critically consider how this work can build towards collaboration and peace through critical reflection
on the part of the facilitators and researchers. Moreover, while music projects can sow the seeds towards peace, they must first and foremost appeal as music projects. Lastly, I’ll close with a few more keynote points: • Musicians Without Borders participants eloquently expressed: “a healthy society includes culture” and that includes the arts • Kathryn Marsh shared: “when we are open to the world, the world is open to us” • Brydie-Leigh Bartleet reminded: “micro acts of kindness can bring about systemic change” • And lastly, two of Laura Hassler’s lessons from the work by musicians without borders so far, which – I think – are relevant for all of us in our varied work: be an ally and build community by taking care of yourself and each other. P.S. A few of us did our best to tweet throughout the two days, so the #PeaceMusicMelb twitter hashtag presents a nice recap of the event, too.
Article Summary:
Hierarchical temporal structure in music, speech and animal vocalisations: Jazz is like a conversation, humpbacks sing like hermit thrushes Anna Fiveash (University of Lyon) anna.fiveash@inserm.fr Have you ever wondered whether whale song, bird song, speech, and music have anything in common? Have you ever wished you could find an objective way to compare across these very different types of sound and communication? Well, Kello, Dalla Bella, Médé, and Balasubramaniam (2017) have done just that! These four very different types of acoustic signal all contain what is called “hierarchical temporal structure”. Hierarchical temporal structure refers to the combination of smaller elements to form larger elements at multiple time scales. Speech is a good example. Imagine listening to the sentence: “Awesome - I want to listen to whale sounds and analyse the acoustic signal!” To understand the meaning of this sentence, the phonemes (the smallest units of sound; e.g., I, w, a, n, t), are combined to form syllables (e.g., an, a, lyse), which are combined to form words (e.g., listen), which are combined to form phrases (e.g., I want to listen to whale
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sounds) and so on. This hierarchical temporal structure creates complexity in sound signals, and can also be found in music and complex animal sounds. The problem is that the acoustic signal for these very different sounds differs widely, and previously it has been difficult to compare across the different categories. To solve this problem, Kello et al., 2017 posited that hierarchical temporal structure could be extracted based on the acoustic signal alone. To do this, they identified areas in each acoustic signal that contained “peaks” of acoustic information, and analysed areas where there were clusters, or groups of peaks. These clusters would be expected to hold important acoustic information, and therefore be integral to the acoustic signal. By using Allan factor analysis (Allan, 1966) at different time windows, the authors were able to identify
clusters of acoustic information that were hierarchical. Hierarchical segments involved clusters in small time windows that grouped together to form larger clusters in larger time windows and so on. Using this analysis, the authors could identify similarities and differences in the temporal structures across different acoustic signals, and investigate whether these acoustic signals contained hierarchical information at multiple levels.
Within the four categories (music, speech, bird song, whale song), Kello et al. (2017) analysed a large number of different acoustic signals. For the speech, they chose human vocalisations including TED talks in different languages, naturalistic interviews, and singing. For music, they looked at a number of genres of popular music, and a number of instances of classical music. They also analysed nightingale and hermit thrush bird song, and humpback and killer whale songs. All of these examples were also compared with jazz instrumentals and recordings of thunderstorms. Thunderstorms were included as a control signal that should not contain hierarchical temporal structure, but that also included peaks of acoustic information. Kello et al. (2017) found evidence for hierarchical temporal structure across all the complex sound signals. Interestingly, at the longer time windows (seconds to tens of seconds), human vocalisations and music had more clustering compared to synthesised speech and animal vocalisations. The authors suggested that the synthesised speech recordings had reduced clustering at higher levels because of reduced prosodic information. This analysis therefore points to prosody as important in creating clusters of peaks in the acoustic speech signal. The authors also observed differences in the acoustic signal depending on whether there was social interaction. For example, there was more temporal structure in interview dialogues compared to TED talks. In addition, the authors found that the killer whale songs contained more clustering at longer time windows compared to humpback whale, hermit thrush, and nightingale songs. They suggested that this differ-
ence was because the killer whale recordings were social in nature, whereas the other animal sounds were solitary recordings. Much like the dialogues in the interviews compared to TED talks, hierarchical temporal structure appeared to be more evident as part of social interaction in animal sounds too. The authors therefore suggested that social interaction and variation in prosody enhances hierarchical temporal structure. Kello et al. (2017) also found that jazz improvisation showed a similar pattern to the interview dialogues, and thunderstorms were very similar to classical music symphonies. Jazz improvisation has previously been likened to having a conversation (Donnay, Rankin, LopezGonzalez, Jiradejvong, & Limb, 2014), however thunderstorms have not often been linked with classical music. The authors speculate on why this similarity occurred in relation to natural power law dynamics. There were a number of other interesting results, including remarkable similarities across languages in TED talks, suggesting strong similarities in hierarchical temporal structure across languages. This new analysis technique will be useful in future research investigating the important question of hierarchical temporal structure across species. Cross-species research can answer important questions about the evolutionary history of hierarchical temporal structure, and provide an insight into the complexity of different animal vocalisations. It can also be used to compare different speech and music acoustic signals. Though we may not be closer to understanding what exactly whales are communicating, we are closer to observing hierarchical temporal structure within their songs. Perhaps we can even discover if their songs become more festive around Christmas time! References Allan, D. W. (1966). Statistics of atomic frequency standards. Proceedngs of the IEEE, 54(2). 221-230. Donnay, G. F., Rankin, S. K., Lopez-Gonzalez, M., Jiradejvong, P., & Limb, C. J. (2014). Neural substrates of interactive musical improvisation: An FMRI study of “trading fours” in jazz. PLoS One, 9(2), e88665. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0088665 Kello, C. T., Bella, S. D., Médé, B., & Balasubramaniam, R. (2017). Hierarchical temporal structure in music, speech and animal vocalizations: jazz is like a conversation, humpbacks sing like hermit thrushes. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 14(135), 20170231. doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0231
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T’is the season for Chirstmas playlists Rebecca Gelding (Macquarie University) Rebecca.gelding@students.mq.edu.au There is no doubt Christmas is coming. It seemed as soon as the shops were putting away their pumpkin heads and spiderwebs of Halloween, up went the Christmas lights, and of course…. out came the carols. And songs about snow. With so much music associated with this festive season, we thought it was a great time to catch up with Dr Amanda Krause, an expert in everyday music listening, to ask her some questions about the role of such music listening in our lives. How do people’s preferred playlists change with the seasons? Research that I conducted as a part of my PhD with Adrian North considered whether the time of year influences people’s preferred music. We found that participants reported a preference for arousing music for the warmer seasons, serene music for spring, and melancholy music for the cooler seasons. Broadly these seasonal correlates map onto research demonstrating associations between season and mood/behaviour, whereby colder weather is associated with low activity and warmer weather is associated with higher activity levels.
Do you think people listen to more music at Christmas time or just different music? If we consider the change in radio playlists, we could say it’s a case of different music. But both could be true – depending on individual listeners. Perhaps more than any other holiday, Christmas includes such a cultural shift in behaviour – the decorations, the foods, the Christmas sweaters… It’s not just the music that makes up the “holiday spirit”, but I imagine it’s front and centre! How would you recommend putting together the ultimate playlist for a Family Christmas lunchtime gathering? I suppose it depends on who’s a part of your family—classic crooners, contemporary pop artist covers, children’s choirs, classical arrangements…the options for good cheer are a’plenty. For any good playlist, I think you want to think about peppering in some favourite standards (the crowd pleasers) – are there any songs your family loves? Perhaps a range of song topics – and think outside the box, there may be some new versions of old standards that may walk the line of familiar but new. What is your favourite Christmas song? Feliz Navidad by Jose Feliciano. When I was younger, my family had a tradition of travelling from house to house on Christmas Eve. The celebration included a progressive dinner – having afternoon snacks at one cousins’ house, appetizers at another, dinner at another, and dessert at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. When travelling in between houses, we children would ride with different family members, surfing the radio for Feliz Navidad --vying to be named champion for having heard the most instances of Feliz Navidad!
Do you think digital access to music has changes the way we listen to Christmas music? The digitization of music has changed our ability to access music – not just for Christmas music, but for music in general. Never before have we had so much opportunity to access and control what we listen to. Of course, we still hear the seasonal Christmas music when the shops and radios decide it’s time to alter their format; but, now, people have additional opportunities to listen to Christmas music whenever they like. Plus, we have more variety to explore (Jingle Cats, anyone?!) – that is, if someone wants to!
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5 minutes with... Rebecca Gelding Rebecca has been a long standing member of the AMPS Newsletter team, and she kindly agreed to tell us a little more about what she does when not writing for this esteemed publication.
to others. I love hearing about other people’s research; there is no end to what we can learn. In your opinion, what is the most challenging aspect of your job?
What is your current position? PhD student at Macquarie University—I’ve been at it for a while (started part-time in February 2013, and went full time at the start of this year). On the home stretch now and hoping to submit later next year. What are your research interests? I’m interested in music and the brain— specifically what is going on in the brain as people imagine music? I’m using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate the brain oscillations that occur in auditory and motor regions during musical imagery and perception. Um… What’s MEG?
MEG is a functional neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain. Basically we get people to lie down and measure the tiny changes in magnetic fields from outside their heads as they do a task. It's non-invasive, and most importantly for music research both quiet and super fast in terms of timescale resolution. Its a direct measure of brain activity as it happens. For more information you can check out this great video explainer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BLfwZ1NPNKY Why did you choose this particular field of study? I’ve always been fascinated by music and the brain, but the idea to study mental imagery of music actually came from my supervisor, Blake Johnson. Studying imagery is inherently difficult, but I’ve really enjoyed the challenge—especially coming up with new paradigms.
Dealing with self-doubt and constantly feeling stupid. But I don’t think those feelings will ever go away, you just learn to live with them and get on with the next project! What has been the best piece of advice anyone has ever given you? Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, either way you’re right—my Dad (quoting Henry Ford) What is the last book you read? I’ve been reading Grit by Angella Duckworth. I highly recommend—but if you want a shorter version, check out her TED talk. What was the first concert you attended?
In the media
This is really going to show my age, but it may possibly have been Natalie & Vince from Young Talent Time at the local RSL when I was in primary school. I believe Vince touched my hand, and I was fairly certain that meant I wasn’t supposed to wash my hand ever again. My first concert with friends (rather than with parents) was Alanis Morrisette on tour with Jagged Little Pill at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. She was amazing!
Part-time PhD students do it better: Three unspoken truths. Rebecca Gelding, Times Higher Education.
What was the first Vinyl/Cassette/CD you bought for yourself? It may well have been Young Talent Time Greatest Hits. Describe someone outside your field of interest who inspires you, and why? My favourite Australian scientist: Prof. Emma L. Johnston. She is an amazing science communicator and advocate for science. I could listen to her talk all day. If you are on twitter, definitely follow her: @DrEmmaLJohnston
What is your favourite aspect of your job?
If you could travel back in time, and give your first-year undergraduate self one piece of advice what would it be?
I think my favourite aspect of my PhD so far has been meeting other amazing scientists (at AMPS conferences for example!), and connecting with them—or helping them connect
Don’t worry about the future. Nothing you do in life is ever wasted if you keep learning something new.
Hitting a long note: One of the world’s largest pianos finds a grand stage. Eleanor Ainge Roy, The Guardian. ‘Bone Music’: The revival of making albums made from Xrays. Travis M. Andrews, The Washington Post. Catching earworms on Twitter: Using big data to study involuntary musical imagery. Lassi Liikanen et al., Music Perception.
Odds and ends AquaSonic. The underwater band. Tuuletar. Finnish vocal folkhop. Namibian Didge Lessons. Didgeridoo may help with sleep apnea.
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Book Review
Is music a distraction? By Jordi A. Jauset Marc Serra i Griera mserr485@xtec.cat
Few things can be more outrageous or infuriating than to have the Spanish minister of Education, José Ignacio Wert, uttering in 2013: “artistic education distracts from the other subjects”. This book, by Jordi A. Jauset Ph.D., professor at Universitat Ramon Llull (Barcelona), lecturer, musician and writer, argues otherwise. Using simple Spanish language, this book is devoted to the neuroscience of music, and its links to music therapy, education and its benefits. Jauset maintains that music is not a distraction, and in fact many countries around the world that invest more hours in artistic subjects show greater academic success.
Music Therapy, and author of several other books on the topic: “Música, sonido y espiritualidad” (Music, sound and spirituality), “Cerebro y música, una pareja saludable” (The brain and music, a healthy couple) and “Música y neurociencia: la musicoterapia” (Music and neuroscience: music therapy).
Music is a powerful stimulus for neuroplasticity, and there is no other art which demands as many resources as music (Altenmüller et al., 2014). As a result, musician’s brain are considered a The hearing process and its impact on good model of neuronal new-borns are topics covered with abplasticity. One surprising solute rigor and knowledge. Jauset arstudy refers to a group of gues that during pregnancy, music younger musicians whose could be considered nutritious for the brain activity at rest showed developing brain, and that music can greater motor and sensory foster perception and language development (Zhao activity than the resting brains of non-musicians (Li & Kuhl, 2016). Music impacts our body, mind and et al., 2014). psyche, and, in turn, behaviour, which has a significant and positive influence on our mental skills. In conclusion, the book is aimed at educators, reMusic can therefore be a useful tool to improve dif- searchers and all those people interested in taking a ferent cognitive skills (e.g., Fujioka et al., 2006). step forward in knowing more about the power of music in relation to education and neurology. In his “Music is not miraculous even though an appropri- books, Jauset always uses simple language to exate use can have many applications that can be ben- plain his scientific point of view. All Spanish readeficial in health and educational contexts” (Jauset, ers who love music and want to learn more about 2017). In recent years, an increasing amount of lit- these exciting topics will be pleased to have it in erature has come to light in the field of music psy- their hands. chology. Quoting the most relevant experts in the References field such as Sacks, Levitin, Koelsch, Zatorre and Altenmüller, E., Siggel, S., Mohammadi, B., Samii, A. & Münte, T. F. many others, Jauset explains how music “acts as a (2014). Play it again, Sam: brain correlates of emotional music guide through our consciousness mazes”. It is absorecognition. Front. Psychol. 5, 114. doi: 10.3389/ fpsyg.2014.00114. lutely awe-inspiring when we realise that music can Fujioka, T., Ross, B., Kakigi, R., Pantev, C., & Trainor, L. J. (2006). One permeate the whole brain, ranging from the most year of musical training affects development of auditory cortical ancient part (limbic system) to the newest, the neo-evoked fields in young children. Brain, 129(10), 2593-2608. cortex. The book emphasises several morphological Li, J., Luo, C., Peng, Y., Xie, Q., Gong, J., Dong, L., et al. (2014). Probaand chemical changes in our body and brain due to bilistic diffusion tractography reveals improvement of structural network in musicians. PLoS ONE, 9, e105508. doi: 10.1371/ musical training. Consequently, it implies that perjournal.pone.0105508. manent and transitory changes bring about new reZhao, T. C., & Kuhl, P. K. (2016). Musical intervention enhances sponses, attitudes and potential capabilities. infants’ neural processing of temporal structure in music and There is another realm that takes advantage of all these changes: music therapy. This is a field of special interest to Jauset, as a lecturer in the Masters of 8
speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113 (19), 5212-5217.
AMPS conferences through the years... Thanks to Manuel Anglada-Tort (@AngladaTort) from TU Berlin below are maps generated in VOSviewer (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010), a program that uses advanced clustering and natural language processing techniques to analyse and visualise data. These maps were done by extracting all the relevant keywords, that occurred at least 5 times in the text, from abstract books from AMPS conferences (2013, 2015 and 2017). These network maps show how items cluster together (using different colours), the relevance of each item (size of the circle), how to they relate to each other (distance in the map), and the strength of these relationships (width of the lines). What trends do you see?
Music, Mind and Health (2013)
The Art and Science of Music (2015)
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AMPS was formed in 1996 and since, has grown steadily. It now represents the national body of researchers in this field, and is a member of APSCOM. The idea to form a psychology and music society came about during the Fourth International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition (ICMPC4) held at McGill University, Montreal. At that meeting, there was interest for ICMPC to be held in Australia. The first step was to form a group that could coordinate the organization of such an event and to form a music and psychology society similar in focus to those in Europe (ESCOM), Japan (JSMPC), and the United States (SMPC). Our aim is to bring Australian researchers together and to represent Australian research overseas. The members of AMPS regularly meet to discuss research, with local and overseas presenters addressing a variety of topics. These have ranged from psychophysics and psychoacoustics, cochlear mechanics, rhythm and pitch perception, to emotional responses to music, musical development, skill acquisition, and social aspects of ensemble performance. At present our Seminar Series, Music Auditory Cognition & Mind (MACAM), meets regularly at The University of Melbourne. We welcome new members, students and researchers alike. Membership is free! Becoming a member is as simple as joining our mailing list.
Musical Affects (2017)
Australian Music & Psychology Society (AMPS)
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