Conference on Music Induced Hearing Disorders

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With the advent and omnipresence of portable listening devices and louder sound systems for live sound reproduction, the interest in music-induced hearing disorders and their measurement and prevention is global. This conference will provide attendees with a detailed understanding of state-of-the-art hearing loss prevention strategies and devices as they relate to music production and reproduction.
                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Dates: June 20-22, 2012
Location: Columbia College • Chicago, IL, USA
Chair: Michael Santucci

If you wish to be contacted with conference updates please click here.

Authors, the Call for Papers is now available.

JAMMMIT Joint Action, Models of Music and Movement Interactions in Time

Joint action denotes coordinated, synchronised actions performed by a number of individuals together, and is characterised by shared goals. Joint action is a crucial aspect of social interaction, given that it has been shown to promote a sense of connectedness and increased rapport between individuals in a group. Until recently, research in joint action and social interaction has focused on interpersonal synchrony and it has often been concerned with modelling the temporal aspects of interacting systems. A recent development is looking at joint action from an embodied cognition point of view, in which the action-perception cycle in behaviour is investigated, especially when the focus lies on how the sensory information that an individual can gather from the environment, including the behaviour of other individuals, impacts his or her behaviour.

A framework of joint action is emerging that can explain tightly related concepts such as action understanding, intention and social cognition. The recent developments in this field promise a fertile path for investigating music listening- and performance from both a joint action- and an embodied cognition perspective.

Playing music together as a group is the pinnacle of human cognitive capacities, demanding the full deployment of attentional mechanisms, fine spatio-temporal motor control, correct anticipation, movement synchronisation and social aspects as action understanding and group interaction. The purpose of this symposium is to bring out and discuss new ways of studying, i.e. measuring and modelling, the spatio-temporal aspects of music and movement with a special focus on the intentions of the people involved.

Topics covered will include: experience and meaning formation, haptic coupling as a model for joint action in music, entrainment, movement synchronisation, joint action, emotion, motivational aspects of music, intention, action understanding, social components of entrainment, and in a concert; polyrhythmic composition.

In 2007, the Flemish government allocated a substantial project funding to Professor Marc Leman, director of IPEM, to continue and expand on his groundbreaking work in Embodied Music Cognition. This symposium will also partly serve to present the project’s midway results to internationally leading experts. It will stimulate the development of international collaborative efforts and discussion on the most fruitful direction for the future research path. All invited researchers will present new and original work, which would form a multi-disciplinary state of the art in joint action research.

The number of participants is limited to 65 so please register here well in advance to ensure your seat.

Proceedings

The topics adressed in this workshop will be published as a special issue in Frontiers in Auditory Cognitive Science.

Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Pacherie
Prof. Dr. Martin Clayton

JSS 2 Online + Music Listening Survey

JSS2 is online - a special issue on different aspects of listening. Within this framework, the next call fits perfectly.

Researchers at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada, and Department of Informatics at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich (LMU) in Germany are conducting a survey about music listening habits which consists of questions on listening hours, preferred devices, use of playlists, active or passive listening, and so on. Their ultimate goal is to create a new tool to make music listening more fun, simple, and intuitive.

Your participation will be anonymous, as they will not record a name, email address, IP address, or anything else that can identify you from your answers. Your connection to their website is secured and encrypted. For maximum confidentiality, they will also remove any potential identifiers from responses (like in the comments you make) and store the raw data in a locked cabinet. The anonymous data will be made available online for other researchers interested in the topic.

You can cancel your participation in the survey at any time by clicking “Exit and Clear Survey” at the bottom right of the page. This will also clear your responses and no record of your participation will be saved. If you wish to keep record of this page, please save or print it. Participation in this survey is entirely voluntary. 

If you wish a copy of any reports or papers from this survey, they will be available at: http://gruvi.cs.sfu.ca/projects/dynamic-musical-experience.

If you consider participating, please go to

https://gruvi.cs.sfu.ca/sites/all/libraries/limesurvey/index.php?sid=15138&lang=en

Summer School on Auditory Cognition

Welcome to the second Summer School on Auditory Cognition, Plymouth 2012

This year, the Summer School on Auditory Cognition will be taking place between July 16th and July 23rd, 2012, in Plymouth, UK. The summer school is exclusively focused on the topic of “Auditory Cognition - Listening in the Real World” and will cover a wide range of subjects, from the basics of auditory perception to higher order cognitive processes, as well as practical applications and new approaches to understanding auditory cognition.

The event will be hosted by Plymouth University, UK and we will be welcoming students from the 15^th of July. We have prepared a 6 day educational program complemented by group work projects for the students and social activities.

Attention: first deadline for applying is the 27^th of May, 2012.

We welcome applications from late-Master and PhD students, with participant numbers limited to 30 places; all successful applicants will be informed by 10^th of June, 2012. If there are enough places left after this date, more participants will be accepted.

About auditory cognition

Auditory cognition covers a whole host of processes from the reception of sounds to the generation of an adaptive response. These responses can vary from the detection and discrimination of multiple sound sources (for example, hearing your name being called in a crowded room), to complex emotional responses such as annoyance or pleasure (e.g. at hearing your favorite song) and even to simple enjoyment of the sonic ambiance. Auditory cognition is therefore, by necessity, aimed at cognitive processes in real-world conditions.

Consequently, the Summer School will be a combination of both theory and practice, covering many levels of auditory processing. This will be a fairly challenging syllabus, introducing topics such as bottom-up processing of sounds to modern theories of awareness, music cognition, speech perception and new approaches in cochlear implants. The practical sessions in the afternoons will allow participants to gain hands-on experience of some of the techniques and applications discussed during the seminar sessions. Students will learn to make proper recordings both in the field and the lab, run some key experiments and be introduced to the body of methodological techniques associated with this field; student’s will also have the opportunity to produce and participate in a sonic-art performance in Plymouth University’s Immersive Vision Theatre.

This year, the teachers and topics to be addressed are:

• Rhodri Cusack: Neural correlates of conscious auditory perception
• Maria Chait: Discovering and representing patterns in sound sequences
• Henkjan Honing: Music cognition
• Annemarie Surlykke: Biosonar: Using sounds to probe the world
• Dick Botteldooren: Environmental acoustics
• Sophie Scott: Neurobiology of speech perception
• Bernhard Laback: New approaches in cochlear implants
• Matt Coombe and Neil Rose: Sound and Space

For more information about the program or fees and such, click here.

Sonic Memories - Call for Contributions

Dear people,

I would like to ask something of you. My installation Soundtracks will be shown at Den Frie in Copenhagen in June and I would like to ask you for a contribution. The idea behind Soundtracks is to build an archive of memories of sound. Memories of sounds which were important to someone, that struck them or stayed with them. Soundtracks wants to research which kind of sounds get remembered, and how they are remembered. Can we hear those sounds again in our heads, or can we only remember the circumstances of the situation; the outlines, the edges of the sound?

And that’s why I would like to ask you to take a moment and try to find your memory of a sound, a sound that was important to you. And I would want to ask you to write down your memory, on paper. And if you could send that memory by post/snail mail to this address:

SNYK, c/o Kristine Bakken (Soundtracks), Graabrødretorv 16, st. th. DK-1154 København K, Denmark

You can find some more info on Soundtracks on this URL: http://versonatura.org/stijn/soundtracks/

Thanks in advance,

Stijn Demeulenaere

PS: It is important that the memories are hand written or hand made, so please, no emails or typed letters. Apart from that, you can write in any language you prefer.

Sonic Radicalism - A Symposium

Centre for Cultural Studies Research School of Arts and Digital Industries University of East London Presents: Music, Politics and Agency Seminar 3: Sonic Radicalism

May 23rd 2012, 13:00-17:00

University of East London, Docklands Campus

Can sound subvert? Thinkers since Plato have assumed that it can, that social form and musical form are intrinsically linked, resonant, or pre-figurative of each other. In this seminar, leading and innovative thinkers will interrogate and explore these claims and their implications.

Speakers and Papers: 

Adam Harper 

Musical Radicalism Beyond the Sonic

Adam Harper is a music critic, music theorist and author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (Zero Books), which argues for a contemporary reappraisal of modernist aesthetics and offers a system for understanding musical creativity, as well as pamphlets on the future of music and underground pop music for the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts and Precinct respectively. He is a PhD candidate, tutor and teacher at the University of Oxford, writes regularly for Wire and Dummy magazines and blogs at Rouge’s Foam.

Matthew Pritchard

‘Cornelius Castoriadis: Music and the Radical Imagination’

Matthew Pritchard is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Music Faculty, University of Cambridge. His work centres on the history of music theory and aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, addressing such topics as the role of the musical motive as vehicle for metaphorical imagination and negotiation, the political origins of modern music analysis, and the social organization of music-aesthetic discourse. “Who killed the concert? Heinrich Besseler and the inter-war politics of Gebrauchsmusik” recently appeared, with an accompanying translation of Besseler’s 1925 essay “Fundamentals of Musical Listening”, in the journal /twentieth-century music/.

Dhanveer Singh Brar

“The whites have become black” - grime, blackness and pathology

Dhanveer is a PhD candidate in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College. His research focuses on black radicalism and its obscured manifestation through phonic substance. He has taught at Goldsmiths College, University of East London and Central St Martins College of Art. Dhanveer is also a member of the University for Strategic Optimism. 

Respondent - Jason Toynbee

Jason Toynbee teaches in the Sociology Department at The Open University. At the moment he’s researching and writing about music and cosmopolitanism, and also trying to work out how far music has taken on an ideological role under neo-liberalism. HIs books include Making Popular Music: Musicians, Aesthetics and the Manufacture of Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2000) and Bob Marley: Herald of  a Postcolonial World? (Polity 2007)

Chair - Jeremy Gilbert, UEL

Cyprus DLR (Docklands Light Railway) station is literally situated at the campus.

For any further details contact j.gilbert <at> uel.ac.uk

Research position at IRCAM

A temporary research position in the PHYSIS project is available at IRCAM. Please find more details at http://www.ircam.fr/71.html?&L=1 or here below.

Researcher for modelling and synthesis of sound textures (ANR project: PHYSIS)
Availability:  start date: June 2012
Duration: 12 months (an extension of up to 6 months is possible)

A full time researcher position is available in the analysis/synthesis team of IRCAM
(http://www.ircam.fr). IRCAM is a non-profit organization located in the centre of Paris. The analysis/synthesis team is part of IRCAM’s R&D department and working on new and  advanced  algorithms for  sound signal  analysis, synthesis and transformation.

PHYSIS is centered on the modelling, transformation and real-time synthesis of diegetic sounds for interactive virtual worlds (video games, simulations, serious games, etc.) and augmented reality. Diegetic sounds comprise all sounds generated by identifiable objects in the virtual scene (e.g. glass, weapons, liquids, fire, water, fabric, etc.) and their possible interactions: physical impacts, footsteps, sliding, rolling, and sweeping. It does not include musical sounds.
PHYSIS is an industrial research project focused on improving our knowledge about how to create real-life sounds and how to interact in real-time with them using semantic and physical controls or emergent tangible interfaces.

The hired researcher will be in charge of the development of technologies related to the segregation of sound textures into components, the representation of these components and the residual background texture, as well as their re-synthesis and transformation. He/she will collaborate with other researchers working on sequence
modelling for texture components, and the synthesis engine. She/he will be required to participate in all activities related to the project (evaluation, meetings, specifications).

Required Experiences and Skills
- Excellent knowledge of and experience in signal models and time/frequency representations of sound signals.
- Excellent knowledge of and experience in audio signal processing (spectral analysis, parameter estimation, extraction of audio descriptors).
- Experience with machine learning techniques and statistical models.
- Very proficient in Matlab or Python (NumPY/SciPY), skills in C/C++ programming.
- Good knowledge of Linux, and/or Mac OS X.
- High productivity, capacity for methodical and autonomous work, creativity, good communication skills, rigor, and excellent programming style.