Happy New Year!
May I take this opportunity to wish you, dear reader, a very happy and prosperous 2012! I am in Spain at the moment with my family recovering from a rather splendid evening of celebrations. My mind (despite its somewhat foggy state) is now turning to thoughts of the year ahead.
There are many things to look forward to in the world of music psychology in 2012. One great source of excitement is the International Conference on Music Psychology and Cognition (ICMPC12) which this year will be twinned with a meeting of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 8). The conference will be held in the beautiful city of Thessoloniki in Greece at the end of July and is sure to be one of the largest such conferences in recent years.
Like many I am sure I am eagerly awaiting news about my submitted abstracts. Fingers crossed for all of us! But whatever happens I am very much looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible at what is sure to be a fascinating conference. If you are unable to make it on this occasion then be assured that musicpsychology.co.uk will carry day by day summaries of everything that I see and hear, just as with ICMPC 11.
There are many other excellent meetings planned for 2012 and the sheer number of conferences from around the world, covering so many sub-disciplines, speaks to the happy continued growth of interest and research in music psychology. I am especially happy to see so many meetings organised by early career researchers. You can browse a list of the current planned meetings on my conference page. If anyone is planning a meeting and would like me to list it on this page then please feel free to drop me an email.
The 2011-12 cohort of masters students in music, mind and brain at Goldsmiths are now settled in nicely and have done a great job with their first modules. They have recently selected topics for their theses and it looks like we are going to have an amazing year of new research from them! They are a fantastic group and I can’t wait to get going on our new module ‘Cognitive Neuroscience of Music’ in a couple of weeks.
As part of the masters theses program, I am really happy that I will get to work with a number of academic partners including Helen Prior and Daniel Leech Wilkinson at Kings College and my wonderful PhD supervisors Graham Hitch and Alan Baddeley at the University of York. I am also excited to learn all about TMS, a completely new area for me, through my Goldsmiths masters project collaborator Michael Banissy.
The masters course also has some great ongoing collaborations with industry partners who are increasingly keen to explore the science behind music products and services. These include Earworms Learning MBT, Linn products, Jo Jingles, and Immedia broadcasting. Thanks to the students and these companies we are looking forward to lots of interesting insights about the impacts of the music in our world on our everyday lives.
And then of course, there will be a wealth of new research to explore from all over the world! For me, this means earworms! Lauren Stewart will return to Goldsmiths in the summer and we will begin three years of work in this area thanks to the Leverhulme trust. Musicpsychology.co.uk will continue to present summaries of this work and the latest papers from the world of music psychology (whenever I get any spare time!) as well as interviews with leading researchers in the field.
Finally, the future of the blog: The blog page on studying music psychology has proved very popular in 2011, as has a recent blog on how to prepare for a music psychology course. I am keen to build on this interest in 2012 and make sure that musicpsychology.co.uk provides useful information for students and early career researchers wherever possible. With this in mind I will begin to post jobs and PhD opportunities more regularly when they cross my path. But if anyone has any suggestions for posts that might be helpful then please feel free to email me.
Wishing you all the very best for a wonderful 2012. ¡Feliz año nuevo!
