Lectures Serra and Honing

My talk will be framed within the theories of embodied musical cognition, thus emphasizing the importance of gesture in the music communication process. I will overview some of the recent research on the study of musical performance gestures and I will focus on our current work on measuring, modeling and generating violin bow gestures. Our specific goal has been to improve the state of the art of electronic synthesis of violin sounds by understanding and modeling the bow movements and mapping musical scores to bow gestures and then bow gestures to sound. I will use quite a number of videos and sound examples.

 

 

 

In order to understand how humans can learn to understand music, we need to discover what perceptual capabilities infants are born with. We address beat induction: the ability to sense beat (a regular pulse in an auditory signal; termed ‘tactus’ in music theory) that helps individuals synchronize their movements with each other, as is necessary for dancing or producing music together. The goal of the current study was to test beat induction in sleeping newborn babies, by assessing whether or not the neonate auditory system forms expectation for the onset (downbeat) of the cycle in a regular rhythmic sound sequence.

 

We found that newborn infants are able to detect the beat in music. The results support the theory that a sense for detecting a regular beat, termed ‘beat induction’ is innate or possibly learned already in the womb. Beat induction is probably fundamental to the origins of music, because it allows clapping or making music together, dancing to a rhythm, etc. The study investigated beat induction in sleeping babies two or three days after birth.

 

It appears that the capability of detecting beat in rhythmic sound sequences is already functional at birth. I will discuss the potential consequences these findings might have for musical development, biology of music, and music cognition research.

 

The research was conducted at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam at the University of Amsterdam within the EmCAP (Emergent Cognition through Active Perception) collaborative project funded by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme for Information Society Technologies (contract no.: 013123).

 

For more information, see http://www.musiccognition.nl/newborns/