Whats new in music cognition?

New Course on Music Cognition, elective of the Research Master Brain and Cognitive Sciences; See here for more information.

Crying of newborn babies: A sign of inborn musical skill?

Even the crying of newborn babies seems to be more musical than we think. This can be concluded from an interesting study that was published last month in Current Biology. German researchers were able to show that newborns don’t just cry randomly, but - when studying the audio signal of their crying - one can distinguish between French and German babies. The German babies - only three days old - cry in a downward fashion, their French contemporaries showed an increasing swelling of the cry and stop abruptly.

Sound example: German & French baby cries.

How can we explain these differences? Babies do hear about three months before they are born. And the few prenatal studies that are available show that babies, in that stage of their development, already perceive and remember sounds. For instance, they recognize the sound of their mothers voice just after birth, and they can distinguish between tunes that they heard during pregnancy from those that they have never been exposed to before.

The correlation between the mother language of the babies and their average crying pattern, suggests that exposure to the language spoken by their caregivers (mother, father, etc.) influences the crying, since French language, on average, consists of raising melodies, and German intonation often shows a decreasing shape. The researchers suggest that this as a sign of a sensitivity to language from very early on in life.

My interpretation would be different. I would not so much relate these results to language, as well as a sign of a high sensitivity to the musical aspects of speech: rhythm, melody, stress (i.e. prosody). As quite some studies have shown (e.g., authors like Fernald, Trehub, Trainor, and others), infants and young children are extremely sensitive to these 'musical' variations in their environment. For example, infants seem to be highly sensitive for the musical and emotional aspects of infant-directed speech (IDS), more so than the actual linguistic structure, let alone semantics. I would therefore claim the results of the baby-study are actual evidence for very early signs of musical sensitivity to intonation and other musical aspects of sound, than that it should be seen as evidence for the start of learning a language.

P.S. I describe this argument in length in my new book Iedereen is muzikaal (Only available in Dutch).

Mampe, B., Friederici, A., Christophe, A., & Wermke, K. (2009). Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064

Is beat induction special? (Part 7)

A recording of a lecture by dr Ani Patel from the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, including an exposé on why beat induction (and/or synchronizing to a beat) might be special to 'musical animals':

Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038

Wat is het belang van muziek? [Dutch]

De Stelling van...Henkjan Honing, vanmiddag te verdedigen op SPUI25, luidt: ‘We zijn allemaal muzikale dieren'.

Over muzikaliteit bestaan veel misverstanden. Mensen die zichzelf amuzikaal vinden, zeggen dat ze geen ritmegevoel hebben of niet zuiver kunnen zingen. Een zingende vogel of een op de maat dansende kaketoe vinden ze echter al snel ‘muzikaal'. Maar kunnen dieren wel muzikaal zijn en wat is muzikaliteit eigenlijk?

"Of een diersoort in staat is om muziek te maken en te ervaren, kun je pas beoordelen als je een definitie van muziek hebt. Maar er zijn nogal wat definities mogelijk: van muziek als geordend geluid tot alles wat je ‘als muziek in de oren klinkt'. Honing stelt dat muziek in feite alles is waarvan wij vinden dat het muziek is, of beter: alles waar wij muziek in horen (music is in the mind of the beholder). Terwijl vogelzang door ons al snel als muziek wordt gehoord, wil dat nog niet zeggen dat het voor vogels ook muziek is. Hetzelfde geldt voor walvissen, dolfijnen en andere dieren die geluid maken dat we graag als muziek betitelen. En daarmee is de grens van wat wel en geen muziek is, wel heel flexibel geworden, betoogt Honing. Het lijkt zinvoller om een onderscheid te maken tussen de begrippen muzikaliteit en muziek. Muzikaliteit als een natuurlijke, op onze biologie gebaseerde eigenschap, en muziek als een cultureel bepaald fenomeen op basis van die biologie. Zonder muzikaliteit geen muziek."

In Amsterdam this week?

For scientists it is nothing special: traveling all summer, visiting several workshops and conferences.
You get to present your years' work in a presentation of just a few minutes (after hours of traveling), and hear a huge number of talks by others (who also have to squeeze their years’ work in a fifteen minutes talk).

Nevertheless, it can be refreshing, these meetings: novel insights, strange data, elegant formalizations or just fun interpretations, all condensed in these strange ten minutes of attention...

This week the Cogsci -Cognitive Science- Conference is in Amsterdam (the first time I will go to a conference on my bike!).

Together with Martin Rohrmeier, Patrick Rebuschat, Psyche Loui, Geraint Wiggins, Marcus T. Pearce and Daniel Muellensiefen our symposium will try to raise the profile of music cognition research:

"In recent years, the study of music perception and cognition has witnessed an enormous growth of interest. Music cognition is an intrinsically interdisciplinary subject which combines insights and research methods from many of the cognitive sciences. This trend is clearly reflected, for example, in the contributions in special issues on music, published by journals such as Nature, Cognition, Nature Neuroscience, and Connection Science. This symposium focuses on music learning and processing and will feature perspectives from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, computational modeling, linguistics, and musicology. The objective is to bring together researchers from different research fields and traditions in order to discuss the progress made, and future directions to take, in the interdisciplinary study of music cognition. The symposium also aims to illustrate how closely the area of music cognition is linked to topics and debates in the cognitive sciences."

If you are around, please join!

N. A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.) (2009). Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Is beat induction innate or learned?

This month a short entry with a selection of discussions related to the Newborn study mentioned in last months entry.

• Discussion at ScienceNews by Bruce Bower.
  
• Discussion at Wired by Brandon Keim.
  
• Interview at WNYC Public Radio by John Schaefer: [soundfile]
• Report by Science Update by Bob Hirshon: [soundfile]
• Report by NewScientist by Hazel Muir, video by Sandrine Ceurstemont:
  

For more media attention see Google news.

Hoe was het Spinozadebat? [Dutch]

This is a short entry with a video impression of the Spinoza te Paard lecture series on recent developments in science, aimed at a general audience. The full broadcast can be viewed at spinozadebat gemist.

Does rhythm make our bodies move?*

Why do some people dance more rhythmically to music than others? Are these differences genetically or culturally determined? These are some typical questions journalists who are interested in rhythm research like to ask.

The link between musical rhythm and movement has been a fascination for a small yet passionate group of researchers. Early examples, from the 1920s, are the works by Alexander Truslit and Gustav Becking. More recently researchers like Neil Todd (University of Manchester, England) [1] defend a view that makes a direct link between musical rhythm and movement. Direct in the sense that it is argued that rhythm perception can be explained in terms of our physiology and body metrics (from the functioning of our vestibular system to leg length and body size).

While this might be a natural line of thought for most people, the consequences of such theories are peculiar. They predict, for instance, that body length will have an effect on our rhythm perception, longer people preferring slower musical tempi (or rates), shorter people preferring faster ones. Hence, females (since they are on average shorter than men) should have a preference for faster tempi as compared to males.

To me that is too direct and naïve a relation. There are quite a few studies that looked for these direct physiological relations (like heart rate, spontaneous tapping rate, walking speed, etc.) and how these might influence or even determine rhythm perception. However, none of these succeeded in finding a convincing correlation, let alone a causal relation. In addition, they ignore the influence that culture and cognition apparently have on rhythm perception. Nevertheless it should be added that embodied explanations do form a healthy alternative to the often too restricted ‘mentalist’ or cognitive approach.

An intriguing study in that respect was done by Jessica Phillips-Silver and Laurel Trainor (McMaster University, Canada) [2] a few years ago. They did an inventive experiment with seven month old babies, and showed that body movement (i.e. not body size) can influence rhythm perception. They had a group of mothers bounce their infants on a rhythm that could be interpreted as either being in duple or in triple meter. They could show (using a head-turn preference procedure, measuring the time an infant pays attention to a stimulus) that bouncing in three or in four influenced the perception of the infant. While one could be critical on some important details, this is a striking empirical finding, and a small step forward in trying to underpin the relation between rhythm cognition and human movement.

J. Phillips-Silver (2005). Feeling the Beat: Movement Influences Infant Rhythm Perception Science, 308 (5727), 1430-1430 DOI: 10.1126/science.1110922

* Repeated blog entry from July 17, 2007.

Waarom kan muziek zulke sterke herinneringen oproepen? [Dutch]

'Muziek raakt onze allerdiepste emoties en blijkt een spoor te trekken in de hersenen. Muziek is ook een drager van herinneringen. Hoe werkt dat? En waarom houdt de één van Bach en de ander van The Beatles?'

De Ncrv-tv zendt vandaag een aflevering uit over muziek, emotie en herinneringen. Zie de trailer.

Voor de volledige aflevering, zie uitzending gemist.
En gerelateerd artikel in de Volkskrant bijlage van 13.12.2008 (met levendige reacties).

Zit muziek tussen je oren? [Dutch]

This week a short note for Dutch readers:

"Elke derde dinsdag van de maand vindt in Het Paard van Troje het NWO-Spinozadebat plaats. Op deze avonden komt de absolute wetenschappelijke top van Nederland naar het Haagse poppodium om de fascinerende kanten van hun vakgebied uit te leggen. En dan niet met behulp van ellenlange formules, grafieken en tabellen maar in begrijpelijke taal. Of de avond interessant wordt hangt van het publiek af. Het is namelijk aan de bezoekers om te komen met prangende vragen die de aanzet zijn voor verdere discussie. Geen voorgekookt programma dus maar interactie met het publiek. Dat wetenschap en muziek prima samengaan zal huis-DJ Henk Koolen bewijzen. Met ondersteuning van VJ Michiel Bos mixt hij de favoriete nummers van de sprekers tot een muzikaal hoogtepunt. Teleac registreert het debat en zendt het via internet en televisie uit." (citaat van NWO website).

Dinsdag 16 december gaat het debat over muziekcognitie. Of, in wat meer wervende termen: over de onvermoede vaardigheden van de gewone luisteraar.

Sommige mensen vinden van zichzelf dat ze geen ritmegevoel hebben of geen toon kunnen houden, en concluderen dat ze dus niet muzikaal zijn. Een begrijpelijk maar hardnekkig misverstand. We zijn allemaal geboren met een talent voor muziek. Dat talent laat zich niet alleen zien in de acrobatiek van het muziek maken, maar ook in het beluisteren en waarderen van muziek. De gewone luisteraar —die we allemaal zijn— heeft een veel grotere rol in wat muziek tot muziek maakt dan vaak gedacht wordt.

Wat is gewoon en wat is bijzonder aan muzikaliteit? Is het herkennen van ingewikkelde melodieën bijzonder, en het meeklappen op de maat van de muziek gewoon? Het zou wel eens precies andersom kunnen zijn.

In deze presentatie verkent Henkjan Honing, universitair hoofddocent muziekcognitie, een aantal visies op het ontstaan van muziek en de actieve rol van luisteraar daarin. Van het ritmegevoel van pasgeboren baby’s tot een op muziek dansende kaketoe en van het maatgevoel van kleuters tot de onvermoede muzikale expertise van gewone luisteraars.

Datum: 16 december 2008
Locatie: Paard van Troje, Prinsegracht 12, Den Haag
Tijd: 20.00 - 21.30 uur; zaal open: 19.00 uur
Prijs: 7 euro (ex. servicekosten)
Kaarten: reserveren via www.paard.nl

Can music (cognition) save your life?

To explore the research finding I’m about to present, I asked my girlfriend this afternoon to think of the film Saturday Night Fever and the song Stayin’ Alive. Being of the generation that grew-up in the late seventies, she could sing it immediately. I tapped along on my computer spacebar (using MusicMath software) which indicated an average of 105 BPM. And, surprisingly, the original was recorded at 103 BPM (well within the just noticeable difference for tempo perception)!

Dan Levitin and Perry Cook did a similar, but more systematic experiment in the late nineties and found that most people can actually do this quite easily —roughly within a 4-8% tempo difference range—, and especially for songs they are quite familiar with. The results were interpreted as evidence for an (iconic) long term memory for tempo, especially for popsongs that are often heard in one single version.

I was reminded of this research because of a recent e-mail by Lauren Stewart (see earlier blog) pointing me at a news clipping from CNN.com/health with the title Stayin' Alive' has near-perfect rhythm to help jump-start heart, stating:

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- "Stayin' Alive" might be more true to its name than the Bee Gees ever could have guessed: At 103 beats per minute, the old disco song has almost the perfect rhythm to help jump-start a stopped heart. In a small but intriguing study from the University of Illinois medical school, doctors and students maintained close to the ideal number of chest compressions doing CPR while listening to the catchy, sung-in-falsetto tune from the 1977 movie "Saturday Night Fever."

Well, I cannot oversee the impact of this for the medical world (it was published as a pilot study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine), yet it is an another interesting example of the fact that we can easily remember the tempo of a familiar or ‘sticky’ song. The pilot-experiment showed that the participants (ten doctors and five medical students, to be precise) when asked think of Stayin’ Alive could easily reproduce the tempo of the original (in this study an average of 108 BPM). Apparently the ‘stickiness’ of the song proves very useful as a kind of mental metronome in applying cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

This might well be the first, potential lifesaving application of music and music cognition research :-)

Levitin, D. J., Cook, P. R. (1996). Memory for musical tempo: Additional evidence that auditory memory is absolute. Perception & Psychophysics, 58, 927-935

D. Matlock, J.W. Hafner, E.G. Bockewitz, L.T. Barker, J.D. Dewar (2008). “Stayin' Alive”: A Pilot Study to Test the Effectiveness of a Novel Mental Metronome in Maintaining Appropriate Compression Rates in Simulated Cardiac Arrest Scenarios Annals of Emergency Medicine, 52 (4), S67-S68

E. Glenn Schellenberg, Sandra E. Trehub (2003). Good pitch memory is widespread Psychological Science, 14 (3), 262-266 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.03432

Can you point at it?

This week an extra entry with a (repeated) poll related to a research project on older and newer internet technologies that support sharing musical taste and exchange of musical listening experiences.

Before explaining more: would you like to do this informal poll?


(If you like, you can use the Comments option below to mention which piece it actually is.)

The project (in preparation) aims not only to analyze and explicate these existing listening communities (e.g. Last.fm, Yo.uTube, Pandora) but also to actively experiment with Web 2.0 technologies by designing and constructing virtual listening spaces that will allow participants to share their listening experiences (LISTEN), make other listeners enthusiastic for a certain musical fragment (LURE), and mark a specific location in an actual recording (LOCATE) - a specific point in the music where a particular listener experienced something special or that s/he considers musically striking or intriguing.

The LOCATE-component of the project was inspired by some early work of John Sloboda (Keele University). He found that a large portion of music listeners could locate (in the score or a recording) specific musical passages that reliably evoked, e.g., shivers down the spine, laughter, tears or a lump in the throat (Sloboda, 1991).

J. A. Sloboda (1991). Music Structure and Emotional Response: Some Empirical Findings Psychology of Music, 19 (2), 110-120 DOI: 10.1177/0305735691192002

Visiting Plymouth, UK this weekend?

The last few weeks I wrote little or no entries mainly because of the overwhelming amount of paper work that comes with finalizing a European research project :-) Nevertheless, the end of the EmCAP project (Sixth Framework, IST) is celebrated this weekend in Plymouth, UK with a public symposium.

This symposium, named Music, Science and the Brain, will discuss the latest scientific contributions to our understanding of how the brain processes music and how this understanding contributes to the development of new technologies for the music industry.

Speakers include all principal investigators of the European EmCAP Project and a number of invited scientists, such as David Huron (Ohio State University, USA), Stefan Koelsch (University of Sussex, UK), Lauren Stewart (Goldsmiths College, UK), Roy Patterson (University fo Cambridge, UK) and Petri Toiviainen (University Jyvaskyla, Finland).

De do do do, de da da da?

For a long time I thought of it as quite a peculiar phenomenon: grown-ups who, the moment they spot a baby, start talking in a curious dialect. A dialect that has unclear semantics, little or no grammar, and is full of exaggerated rhythmic and melodic diversions. Nevertheless, babies love it. They react, cooing with pleasure, to melodies that are not unlike pop songs as ‘De do do do, de da da da’ of The Police or ‘La la la’ by Kylie Minoque. This babbling, or, more formally, infant-direct speech (IDS), differs from normal adult speech by its high pitch, exaggerated melodic contours, a slower tempo, and more rhythmic variation. A kind of ‘musilanguage’ indeed.

IDS is a widespread phenomenon that is —as far as we know— present in all cultures and has more similarities than differences, even when some characteristics of IDS conflict with the rules of the adult language, like Chinese. Hence, it is unlikely that IDS is ‘just’ a preparation for language -- until recently the most common interpretation.

Laurel Trainor, and her team at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada) suggests that IDS is essentially a tool to communicate emotion. The decoding of the speech patterns into their emotional meaning is something infants can do easily, and long before they learn about language. In that sense, it seems more likely that language makes use of faculties special to music then that it emerged as a side effect of language (as as suggested once by a well-known cognitive psychologist).

Laurel J. Trainor, Caren M. Austin, Renee N. Desjardins (2000). Is Infant-Directed Speech Prosody a Result of the Vocal Expression of Emotion? Psychological Science, 11 (3), 188-195 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.00240

How did music evolve?

This week a podcast from the Guardian on music, the brain, and evolutionary psychology (by James Randerson, Francesca Panetta and Marcus Pearce | guardian). How did music evolve, how is it linked to language, and how is it understood by the brain.

Ian Cross (Cambridge University) talks about how music acts as a social tool. Eric Clarke (Oxford University) talks about musical meaning and why dance music has such a profound effect on a club full of revellers. Adena Schachner (Harvard University) talks about her analyses of birds in relation to beat induction. In addition, snippets of Stefan Koelsch (Sussex University), Ani Patel (Neuroscience Institute, San Diego), Andrea Norton (Harvard Medical School), Geraint Wiggins (Goldsmiths College London) and Paul Robertson (founder and leader of the Medici String Quartet) can be heard.

Does exposure matter?

Last week the University of Amsterdam issued a press release on the results of our study on musical competence and the role of exposure (to be published in an upcoming issue of JEP:HPP). I didn’t expect it to have too much impact, but it is surprising to see how many news sites simply copied the text of the original release:

"Researchers at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) have demonstrated how much the brain can learn simply through active exposure to many different kinds of music. The common view among music scientists is that musical abilities are shaped mostly by intense musical training, and that they remain rather rough in untrained listeners, the so-called Expertise hypothesis. However, the UvA-study shows that listeners without formal musical training, but with sufficient exposure to a certain musical idiom (the Exposure hypothesis), perform similarly in a musical task when compared to formally trained listeners. Furthermore, the results show that listeners generally do better in their preferred musical genre. As such the study provides evidence for the idea that some musical capabilities are acquired through mere exposure to music."

My compliments, therefore, to those journalists who actually read the publication and gave their own perspective on the results, such as Wired, WN.com and Wissenschaft Actuel, with a special mention for NRC Handelsblad :-)

What is the point of a mechanical shoe?

Fragment of the UvA tv-series De Fascinatie on the computational modeling of music cognition.

Music ≠ sound?

This week another fragment of the tv-series The Fascination on research by scholars and scientists of the University of Amsterdam. The fragment below is about music cognition and is questioning the common definition of music as being (structured) sound.

Muziek speelt met de luisteraar [Dutch]

This week a video that was directed by Bob van Gijzel (AVC/UvA) as part of a series of short films with the title De Fascinatie: Scholars and scientists from the Universiteit van Amsterdam talk about their fascination in research. This one is on music cognition. Below a short fragment (in Dutch):


Click here for the full episode.

Why do we have music? (On music vs musicality)

Looking back on it, a returning question in this blog turns out to be: Why do we have music? And what is the point of studying it scientificly?

While it became quite popular to address such questions from an evolutionary perspective, there is still little support for the idea that music is an adaptation, that it makes you live longer, or that it makes one sexually more attractive. In fact, it made Steven Pinker position music as, at most, a byproduct of language:

As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless … music is quite different from language … it is a technology, not an adaptation (Pinker, 1997)

This statement —and the reference to music as ‘auditory cheesecake'— did not, as you can imagine, increase his popularity among music lovers. Nevertheless, he succeeded well in starting up a discussion under music scholars and cognitive scientists on why we have music and why it could be relevant for cognitive science to study music (e.g., Ashley et al, 2006; Zatorre, 2005).

In that respect, the archaeologist Steven Mithen did something you might have expected from a music scholar or cognitive scientist. In his book The Singing Neantherthals he presents a compelling story in support of the shared evolutionary origins of music and language. As the book title suggests, Mithen is particularly concerned with the Neanderthals, presenting them as intelligent and highly emotional individuals who communicated with a particularly musical version of Hmmmmm. (‘Hmmmm’ being Mithen's proposal for a musilanguage that might have preceded language and music).

In turn, Mithen’s book generated quite some discussion as well. In part because of the (impossible) question on what defines music, or, to be more precise, the important distinction between musicality and music. In a recent paper Mithen makes himself more clear:

The distinction I should have made explicit was between a ‘natural biologically based musicality’ and music as a culturally constructed phenomenon which builds upon that biological basis. So the musical ‘m’ in Hmmmmm ought to stand for the former — which had seemed quite obvious to me already — while the latter developed after Hmmmmm had bifurcated into music and language. Although I appreciate that the following have a culturally learnt component, I would describe bird song, whale song, primate vocalizations and baby babble as possessing musicality rather than being music.

Mithen, S., Morley, I., Wray, A., Tallerman, M., Gamble, C. (2006). The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body , by Steven Mithen. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005. ISBN 0-297-64317-7 hardback £20 & US$25.2; ix+374 pp.. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 16(01), 97. DOI: 10.1017/S0959774306000060

McDERMOTT, J., HAUSER, M. (2005). THE ORIGINS OF MUSIC: INNATENESS, UNIQUENESS, AND EVOLUTION. Music Perception, 23(1), 29-59. DOI: 10.1525/mp.2005.23.1.29

Does music facilitate language acquisition?

The latest issue of Cognition contains a brief, yet interesting study on the role of music in language acquisition. While several authors have shown that language learning can be modeled according to the statistical properties of syllable sentences, just a few studies showed that for musical information a similar case for statistical learning can be made.

Daniele Schön (Marseille, France) and collaborators show in their study that a group of French participants, with an average age of 23, do better in learning new words associated with distinct pitches –a melody- than those being spoken in monotonous fashion (In this case really monotonous since it was a speech synthesizer). The study is especially interesting in the context of research on infant-directed speech that turns out to be quite ‘musical’ (i.e. melody and rhythm play an important role), especially when compared to ‘real’ speech, as such indirectly supporting the idea that these musical aspects actually facilitate communication and learning in infants.

However, since only language learning was tested, it could not be shown that the participants relied more on musical than on linguistic information. An effect one could expect since several studies have shown that musical information can help in memorization and learning. While the authors were able to show that

“learning a new language, especially in the first learning phase wherein one needs to segment new words, may largely benefit of the motivational and structuring properties of music in song”

unfortunately —because of the experimental design used— no conclusion can be drawn about whether learners rely more on musical or linguistic information. What could be shown was that linguistic information took precedence over musical statistical cues. I would have expected the opposite, like it was found in infant studies.

SCHON, D., BOYER, M., MORENO, S., BESSON, M., PERETZ, I., KOLINSKY, R. (2008). Songs as an aid for language acquisition. Cognition, 106(2), 975-983. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.03.005

What is music cognition?

In the last three years our group has spend quite some energy in promoting music cognition as an interesting field of research in the cognitive sciences. The strategy was simple but effective: simply say ‘yes’ —and think along with— any journalist that contacts you. And, as is often the case in media land, once an idea is out and considered interesting, other media want more of the same. The challenge is, however, to make sure music cognition —its insights and results, its aims and prospects— is represented in an appropriate way, without falling into the trap of being reduced to simple facts that are useful for a popular TV quiz (see video below).

In that sense, I sympathize with initiatives like the ‘Battle of the Universities’ that promote the idea that scientists themselves should to take a lead in presenting their research (instead of ‘complaining’ about the media simplifying it too much :-). However, it is not easy to bring forward the essence of one’s field in an intriguing way.



Outreach —as it is often called— is not the same as ‘going on your knees’ to explain your research to a general audience or making populist interpretations of your field. You are in fact challenged to explain your research and insights in different terms. And that can be very rewarding and even influence to your own thinking. With regard to my own research, I could start talking about the computational modeling of music cognition, and the theoretical, empirical and computational methods that we use, but I’m sure a general audience will quickly loose me. A common trick is to think of a typical example that speaks to everyone’s imagination. I often explain my research in terms of the scientific challenge to make a listening machine. Imagine what that would be like? A machine that can listen and react in a human and musical way. And, of course, it should make the same mistakes! It allows you to explain all kinds of computational modeling notions, what should such a machine know, what should it listen for, and how can we compare and evaluate them? We just heard from our university that MCG has been selected to defend the University of Amsterdam in the Battle of the Universities. A challenge to look forward to ...