Wednesday, July 29, 2009

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!

ResearchBlogging.orgN. 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

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Why is the blog so silent the last few weeks?

This summer you will find less postings than usual on this blog. This is because I'm busy finalizing a book and a number of research proposals, hopefully generating some new jobs in music cognition :-) So no worry, this is just a summer dip ...

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

What's new in the neurosciences and music?

Volume 1169 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences is about to be published with the title The Neurosciences and Music III: Disorders and Plasticity. The volume explores issues related to music and medicine through a focus on musical disorders and plasticity.