I missed the start of the afternoon session as I was chatting away to long lost colleagues and friends. They are not actually ever lost of course, but they do spend most of the time a very long way from London so I enjoy catching up with how they are getting on in life and in work. The sad consequence of this is that I kept missing things on the first day! In the afternoon paper session (two in each session) I managed to catch Erin Hannon’s talk about pattern learning in music and language. Erin started off with a discussion of the evidence both for dissociation and overlap between…

In the second part of the morning on Day 1 I visited 4 poster presentations (the new 5 minutes oral pre-presentations), the first of which was from one of our Music, Mind and Brain masters students. It is great to see them coming into their own on the world stage! Alex Billig did his masters project with Daniel Müllensiefen, comparing models of melodic contour in music and speech.  He compared and contrasted four different models of contour that increase in complexity by nature of the degree to which they did not compress the melodic contour information. Participants listened to both short melodies and speech-like (filtered) sentences and pointed to one…