Featured Speakers

Keynote Speakers

José Luis Besada

Music Theory, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

TITLE: Composers shaping time: a singular window for cognitive science

Since the Romantic period, the imperatives of novelty and individual expression have been among the most salient features shaping the Western art music tradition. This ideological perspective has pushed a great number of composers of the 20th- and 21st-centuries to devise personal conceptions of many musical features and parameters for developing their creative practices. The traces of these practices–mainly found in their sketches but also through further sources catching their reflection–can become a singular window for better grasping musical creativity from a cognitive point of view. In addition, a focus on musical conceptions of time may nurture, broadly speaking, cognitive science with particular case studies of highly creative people artistically dealing with this concept, which is also pivotal for managing our daily lives.

My talk will take the work and reflections of several composers, namely Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), Gérard Grisey (1946-1998), Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023), and Alberto Posadas (b. 1967). I will resort to several elements borrowed from cognitive linguistics and general psychology in order to discuss the cross-modal correspondences which are found in several of their time conceptualizations, as well as the cognitive mechanisms explaining the use and manipulation of some their geometrical representations of time.

BIOGRAPHY

Following two post-doctoral periods at IRCAM and at the University of Strasbourg, José L. Besada is currently a mid-term research fellow at the Complutense University of Madrid. His research focuses on the formal, technological, and cognitive features of both contemporary musical practices and music theory. Some of his works have been published in leading music journals such as Perspectives of New Music, Tempo, Organised Sound, Music Analysis, and Music Theory Online. He has been twice guest co-editor of special issues for Contemporary Music Review and is the editor of the arts section of the Journal of Mathematics and Music. He is a founding member of the Sociedad de Análisis y Teoría Musical (SATMUS) in Spain, and the editor-in-chief of its journal, entitled Súmula.

Nori Jacoby

Computational Auditory Perception, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

TITLE: Around the world in 30 beats: Universal constraints on rhythm revealed by large-scale cross-cultural comparisons of rhythm priors.

Music is present in every known society, yet varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘‘seed’’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of “telephone”), such that their biases (the Bayesian prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer ratio rhythms. However, the importance of different integer ratios varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. Our results suggest a universal feature of music cognition – discrete rhythm “categories” at small integer ratios. These discrete representations likely stabilize musical systems in the face of cultural transmission, but interact with culture-specific traditions to yield diversity evident when perception is probed at a global scale.

BIOGRAPHY

My research focuses on the internal representations that support and shape our sensory and cognitive abilities, and on how those representations are themselves determined by both nature and nurture. I address these classic issues with new tools, both by applying machine learning techniques to behavioral experiments, and by expanding the scale and scope of experimental research via massive online experiments and fieldwork in locations around the globe. I am a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, where I direct the "Computational Auditory Perception" group, and and incoming assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University (starting in Fall 2024). Previously, I was a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University, and a postdoc at Josh McDermott's Computational Audition Lab at MIT and at Tom Griffiths's Computational Cognitive Science Lab at UC Berkeley. I completed my Ph.D. at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Naftali Tishby and Merav Ahissar, and hold a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics and an M.A. in mathematics from the same institution.

Tosca Lynch

Classics, History, FRSA – eMousike.com

TITLE: ‘Shaping the flow’: ancient Greek rhythm and the movement of the voice

This talk will explore the Greek notion of ‘rhythm’ (rhythmos, literally ‘flow’) as the dynamic ‘shape’ that organises the coordinated ‘movements of the voice’, i.e. melodies, and those of the body, i.e. dance steps (Pl. Leg. 2.664e–673a). We will start by looking at the origins of the Greek concept of rhythmos and its relationship to the Greek notion of ‘metre’ (metron)—concepts that, as we shall see, were very different from what is known as ‘metre’ and ‘rhythm’ in modern musicology.

We will then examine the main features of the ‘science of rhythm’ (rhythmikē) developed by Aristoxenus of Tarentum, paying special attention to the unit of measurement he created—the ‘primary duration’ (prōtos chronos)—and its theoretical implications. We will subsequently look at the key aesthetic role played by different types of ‘rhythmical feet’ (podes), their distinctive components (arsis and thesis), and the emotional impact of rhythms that differed in structure (taxis/schēma) and tempo/direction (agōgē). These theoretical features will be illustrated by means of practical examples preserved in the extant Greek musical documents, including a tragic lament from Euripides’ Orestes (DAGM 3) and the Seikilos song (DAGM 23).

BIOGRAPHY

Tosca A.C. Lynch (PhD, University of St Andrews) has been Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford, Visiting Professor at the University of Verona, and Research Associate at Oxford. Prior to her training in philosophy and Classics, she earned a performer’s diploma in Classical Piano. Her research interests include technical and performative aspects of ancient rhythmics and harmonics, as well as the broader cultural and philosophical significance of mousikē in the ancient world. The interplay of these perspectives informs most of her publications. In addition to discussions of Plato’s philosophical use of musical concepts (Greek and Roman Musical Studies, 2017, 2020), she has recently advanced new reconstructions of the ancient perception of rhythm and meter (arsis and thesis, Classical Quarterly 2016; ‘Rhythmics’, Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Music, 2020), as well as the harmonic modulations introduced by the so‐called New Music and their relationship to the extant musical documents (Greek and Roman Musical Studie2018, 2022a, 2022b). In 2022, Tosca has launched a new website—www.eMousike.com—that presents new research evidence in a digital humanities perspective, including interactive 3D models of ancient instruments and the dDAGM App (database Documents of Ancient Greek Music).

Plenary Speakers

Anne Danielsen

Musicology: Rhythm and Technology, RITMO, University of Oslo

Benedict Taylor

Music History and Analysis, University of Edinburgh

Dean Rickles

Philosophy and History of Physics, Centre for Time, University of Sydney

Jessica Grahn

Neuroscience, Western University

Martin Clayton

Ethnomusicology, Durham University

Michelle Phillips

Music Psychology, Royal Northern College of Music

Richard Cohn

Yale University