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ICMPC Day Two – Evolution
The evolution symposium was put together by Ani Patel, and included some of the most fascinating and cutting age papers from the field of “biomusicology”. In general biomusicologists are not interested in studying any particular style of music, but rather in the human capacity for music itself and in better understanding the biological basis that is shared among all musics. 1) First up was Professor Techumseh Fitch, one of my favourite speakers I have to admit. He started off with a really engaging introduction to the field which must have been brilliant for all the students for whom this may have been completely new territory. He talked about the development…
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ICMPC Day One- Music and Cognitive Skills
Finally, I attended a shorter session to end Day One at ICMPC. Just two talks in this section, both based on studies investigating the association between music lessons and cognitive skills. The first was a study by Glenn Schellenberg and the second by Kathleen Corrigall (Laurel Trainor’s student) 1) Glenn began by reviewing the difficulties encountered when studying the link between musical training and increases in cognitive skills. The difficulty of detecting the effects of “shared environmental factors” is notorious – your study has to control for many factors both across and within subjects. Glenn’s 2004/2006 studies rightly remain the gold standard in this field, where he established evidence for…