January 2014 - News!

Conferences, Symposiums, Workshops     view all upcoming

  • ICMPC Seoul, August 4 - 8, 2014, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2014 See website
     

  • 9th Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology

Technology is the theme of CIM14, which will be held from 04 to 06 December 2014 at Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung (National Institute for Music Research), in Berlin, Germany.

Technology is omnipresent in our lives and it plays an important role in contemporary social development, particularly in the so-called Westernised world. The role of technology in our daily life is even more so remarkable with the increasing ubiquity of technology, especially computing technology, in various activities of our contemporary society, music being a notable example. Yet, there is no single universally accepted definition of "technology".

CIM14 will be aimed at all discourses on the interplay between technology and music, including collaborations between sciences and humanities, interactions between academic research and musical practice, and interdisciplinary combinations that are innovative, unusual, and creative. Abstract submission deadline: 01 July 2014. For further details please click here  

  • Open Repositories 2014 Call for Proposals

    As the year turns it's time to look forward to the Ninth International Conference on Open Repositories, OR2014 (#or2014). The conference will take place June 9-13 in Helsinki, Finland hosted by University of Helsinki's twin libraries: Helsinki University Library and the National Library of Finland.
    The theme this year is "Towards Repository Ecosystems" emphasizing the interconnected nature of repositories, institutions, technologies, data and the people who make it all work together. There are several different formats (see below) provided to encourage your participation in this year's conference. Review the call for proposals here and submit your proposal here. Deadline for proposals is February 3, 2014
     

  • Mapping Culture: Communities, Sites and Stories

    International Conference on "Mapping Culture: Communities, Sites and Stories," May 28-30, 2014 in Coimbra, Portugal, organized by Nancy Duxbury, PhD, Senior Researcher, Co-coordinator, Cities, Culture, and Architecture Research Group, Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES) | Centre for Social Studies, State Associate Laboratory, University of Coimbra, duxbury@ces.uc.pt. Deadline for Proposals: 14 February 2014   MappingCulture2014_CFP.pdf

     

AIRS News

  • New paper by AIRS collaborators Psyche Loui and Gottfried Schlaug, Department of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston MA, USA

"Effects of voice on emotional arousal." Frontiers in Psychology, 1 OCT 2013, DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00675. Authors: Psyche Loui, Justin P. Bachorik, H. Charles Li, & Gottfried Schlaug

Music is a powerful medium capable of eliciting a broad range of emotions. Although the relationship between language and music is well documented, relatively little is known about the effects of lyrics and the voice on the emotional processing of music and on listeners' preferences. In the present study, we investigated the effects of vocals in music on participants' perceived valence and arousal in songs. Participants (N = 50) made valence and arousal ratings for familiar songs that were presented with and without the voice. We observed robust effects of vocal content on perceived arousal. Furthermore, we found that the effect of the voice on enhancing arousal ratings is independent of familiarity of the song and differs across genders and age: females were more influenced by vocals than males; furthermore these gender effects were enhanced among older adults. Results highlight the effects of gender and aging in emotion perception and are discussed in terms of the social roles of music.

  • New paper by AIRS collaborator Daniele Schön, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Aix-Marseille Université Aix-en-Provence, France and Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, USA

    "Listening to the human voice alters sensorimotor brain rhythms." PLoS One, 12 NOV 2013, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0080659. Authors: Yohana Lévêque & Daniele Schön

    While neuronal desynchronization in the mu (≈ 10 Hz) and beta (≈ 20 Hz) frequency bands has long been known to be an EEG index of sensorimotor activity, this method has rarely been employed to study auditory perception. In the present study, we measured mu and beta event-related desynchronisation (ERD) while participants were asked to listen to vocal and triangle-wave melodies and to sing them back. Results showed that mu and beta ERD began earlier and were stronger when listening to vocal compared to non-vocal melodies. Interestingly, this humanness effect was stronger for less accurate singers. These results show that voice perception favors an early involvement of motor representations.
     

  • London-based IG Alzheimer's Choir

    Dr. Carol Beynon at the University of Western Ontario shared a link to a radio documentary about the London-based IG Alzheimer's Choir that was aired December 11, 2013. It nicely features the impact of singing and pedagogies of singing for health and wellbeing of the teens, persons with Alzheimer's and their caregivers in singing situations. (It's the first story after the headlines and the report is about 10 minutes long.)

 

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