Music as Human Communication: An HCSNet Workshop on the Science of Music Perception, Performance and Cognition

Details Date: 17th-18th July, 2006
Location: MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney (Bankstown – Milperra campus)
Contact: Kate Stevens, kj.stevens@uws.edu.au (UWS) and Emery Schubert, e.schubert@unsw.edu.au (UNSW)
Workshop URL: http://marcs.uws.edu.au/events/conferences/archive/2006/musicashumancommunication.htm
Program: Download the program [PDF] Updated July 10

Keynote Speakers

Goal

The aim of this two-day national workshop is to present and discuss the latest research that investigates human communication in the form of music perception, performance and cognition. The theme is deliberately interdisciplinary to bring together established, early career, and student researchers from psychology, music, acoustics, computer science, linguistics, and speech science. Topics for discussion might include performance and musical acoustics, the development of musical expectancies, affect expression and recognition in music, near-universal features of music and cross-cultural issues, the modularity debate regarding music and language. Two keynote speakers (Prof Barbara Tillmann from CNRS, France and Prof Laurel Trainor from McMaster University, Canada) and student and staff researchers from around Australia will showcase methods for rigorous investigation of the arts, and highlight current knowledge of non-verbal cues to affect such as intensity, tempo, timing and rhythm, phrasing, intonation and prosody. The workshop will also be relevant to those interested in music information retrieval.

Day 2 of the workshop will have a more specific focus on applications of music perception and cognition to issues of intonation in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis systems and naturalness of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The papers and brainstorming sessions on Day 2 will contribute to the HCSNet Priority Areas Effective Interfaces and Human and Machine Speech being designed to stimulate discussion of a new Art-Meets-Science approach to automated speech systems.

This workshop is funded by the ARC Human Communication Sciences Network (HCSNet).

Materials

Slides from Workshop presentations

These slides are in Powerpoint format; they may be viewed with OpenOffice.org or PowerPoint Viewer. All slides copyright © their respective authors.

TitleSpeaker(s)
Is music the key? An investigation of the effect of music on learning in virtual-immersive environmentsEric Fassbender, Macquarie University
The role of spirituality within the musical experiencePeter Atkins, University of New South Wales
Affect in computer-generated music?Freya Bailes & Roger T. Dean, University of Canberra
Steps and leaps in human memory for melodies: The effect of pitch interval magnitude in a melodic contour discrimination taskTim Byron & Kate Stevens, University of Western Sydney
Quantification of Gabrielsson's relationships between expressed and felt emotionsPaul Evans, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Emery Schubert, University of New South Wales
The use of Physiological signals in generative artJames Sheridan, Australian National University
The importance of differentiating musically induced emotion felt from emotion perceivedSherilene Carr & Nikki Rickard, Monash University
Influencing perceived musical emotions: The importance of performative and structural aspects in a rule systemSteven R. Livingstone & Ralf Muhlberger, University of Queensland; Andrew R. Brown, Queensland University of Technology