AIRS News  

• 2017 starts out well with the signing of contracts for a book series with titles representing the original AIRS Research Themes (Annabel Cohen series editor):
  

  • Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Research in Singing: Volume I  Development (Co-editors: Frank Russo, Beatriz Ilari, Annabel Cohen)

  • Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Research in Singing:  Volume II  Education (Co-editors - Helga Gudmundsdottir, Carol Beynon, Karen Ludke, Annabel Cohen)

  • Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Research in Singing: Volume III  Well-being (Co-editors - Rachel Heydon, Daisy Fancourt, Annabel Cohen)

• From AIRS research sub-theme on Singing and Intergenerational Understanding,  the book by Rachel Heydon and Susan O'Neill  entitled Why Multimodal Literacy Matters: (Re)conceptualizing Literacy and Wellbeing through Singing-Infused Multimodal, Intergenerational Curricula  (2016 - 168 pages) is now available. Link
  

• Johan Sundberg invites all voice enthusiasts to organize events for  World Voice Day 2017 - anything public centered on the voice (lectures, public rehearsals, seminars, symposia, concerts) and these can take place around April 16, not necessarily on April 16; however,  the Global Vocal Concert will be at 19.30 local time in each time zone, moving by time zone around the world.  If you go ahead with this please mention the AIRS connection in your promotional material.  So far there have been 4 AIRS events over the last 2 years, but there can easily be many  more, especially with advance planning.
  

• An overview of the AIRS Project was presented on January 12 by Annabel Cohen (AIRS Director)  to an interdisciplinary audience of students and faculty at the University of South Florida, Department of Music Education, hosted by Jennifer Bugos of the Department of Music Education, who has been using the remote version of the AIRS Test Battery of Singing Skills with senior adults and is incorporating components from the battery in an ongoing study of the relative benefits of various interventions on a variety of  cognitive abilities in a variety of domains.
  

• Please send items for next newsletter to airs@upei.ca
   
  

Conferences, Symposiums, Workshops     view all upcoming

• The Neurosciences and Music  - VI,  an International conference to be held in Boston, 15-18 June 2017.  Central theme is "Music, Sound and Health".  The programme will include Keynote Lectures, Symposia, and Poster Sessions. Poster submission deadline: February 15.   LINK
  

• The European Association of Cochlear Implant Users - EURO-CIU Symposium 2017, Helsinki, Finland, 20-21 April.   LINK
  

• Meeting of Society for Music Perception and Cognition,  University of California, San Diego, CA, USA,  July 30-Aug. 3, 2017. Abstract submission deadline: February 15.  LINK 
   
  

Student Opportunities

• The Cognitive Science Departement  of École Normale Supérieure in Paris (Département d'études cognitives, DEC) aims to recruit advanced undergraduate international students in Cognitive Science and in Linguistics.  LINK
  

AIRS News  

• AIRS welcomes Dr. Hewitt, President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, as he visits Prince Edward Island and the AIRS research facility at UPEI, among other SSRHC initiatives on the campus. Representative students, faculty, and partners are delighted to greet him and share information about their engagement in and contribution to the project. 
  

• The paper entitled "Identifying style-types in a sample of musical improvisations using dimensional reduction and cluster analysis"  by Blair K. Ellis, Heungsun Hwang, Patrick E. Savage,  Bing-Yi Pan,  Annabel J. Cohen, and Steven Brown has been accepted for publication in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (published by the American Psychological Association).  The study describes a new approach to classifying improvisations, particularly improvisations from non-experts.  The process has a number of steps, the first of which is based on the Cantometrics system of Lomax which led to the development of the CantoCore classification system in the laboratory of Steven Brown. The data to which the new techniques were applied were from the improvisations produced by participants in the AIRS Test Battery of Singing Skills. The work was completed in connection with the Master's thesis of Blair Ellis  with Steven Brown.  Blair had spent two summers with AIRS during and following his undergraduate degrees in music and psychology at Mount Allison University.  Bing-Yi Pan  did developmental work on the online AIRS Test Battery carrying out postdoctoral studies with AIRS. This is the first publication to report data from the online version of the AIRS Test Battery.  Steven and Blair first connected met at UPEI when Steven  gave a keynote address and participated  in a summer workshop on the resilience of song at UPEI.
  

• Johan Sundberg invites all voice enthusiasts to organize events for  World Voice Day 2017 - anything public centered on the voice (lectures, public rehearsals, seminars, symposia, concerts) and these can take place around April 16, not necessarily on April 16; however,  the Global Vocal Concert will be at 19.30 local time in each time zone, moving by time zone around the world.  If you go ahead with this please mention the AIRS connection in your promotional material.  So far there have been 4 AIRS events over the last 2 years, but there can easily be many  more, especially with advance planning.
  

• Both Helga Gudmundsdottir and Lily Chen-Hafteck were  invited to participate on the program of a conference in held at the "New directions for performance and music teacher education: A symposium on university music education in China" held at The Arts College of Xiamen University,  Fujian Province, China. Helga's presentation was entitled "Strategies and challenges in forming an eclectic program in music teacher education" and Lily's was "Connecting music and culture in teacher education: enhancing students' musical and cultural understanding".  Both  presenters are doing much travelling this term as Fulbright Scholars - Helga now based at Columbia and Lily at the Hong Kong Baptist University.
  

• Please send items for next newsletter to airs@upei.ca
  

Conferences, Symposiums, Workshops     view all upcoming

• The Society for Music perception and Cognition (SMPC), San Diego, CA. 30 July - 3 August, 2017.  Submissions deadline: 15 Feb, 2017.  LINK
  

• The Neurosciences and Music  - VI,  Boston, 15-18 June 2017.  Poster submission deadline has passed.  LINK 
  

• Association for Psychological Science, Boston, 25-28 May 2017. Symposium submission deadline has passed.  LINK