July 14, 2006

The science of music perception will be discussed at a two day workshop to be held at the University of Western Sydney’s Bankstown Campus on 17 and 18 July 2006.

Associate Professor Kate Stevens, from the UWS MARCS Auditory Labs, says the event will present the latest research on why we are moved by music, how we remember music and the similarities of music and speech perception.

"Music offers many opportunities to investigate human communication – as a stimulus tool, as culture and art form, as non-verbal communication, and as a complex visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic event,” says Associate Professor Kate Stevens, who is the event’s convener.

"The theme is deliberately interdisciplinary in an effort to bring together established and emerging researchers from psychology, music, acoustics, computer science, and linguistics.

"The workshop is designed to encourage researchers in the disparate areas of speech science and music to begin to work together to solve some of the ongoing problems with text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) systems and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems,” she says.

"TTS, for example, has generally poor intonation and unnatural rhythm. ASR is weak at detecting the emotional response of a speaker and at adapting to the speed of a speaker’s voice.

"Music, on the other hand, is rich in intonation, rhythm, and expressive timing.

"The workshop will consider ways in which knowledge of musical composition, performance and perception might assist TTS and ASR design,” says Associate Professor Stevens.

"The ultimate goal is to find novel solutions through new and surprising inter-disciplinary connections."

Funded by the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science (HCSNet), the workshop brings together leading researchers Professor Barbara Tillmann from CNRS Neurosciences & Systemes Sensoriels, France, and Professor Laurel Trainor from McMaster University, Canada, as well as 19 speakers from universities around Australia.