I ventured into the computation modelling seminar for one talk at the start of Day Three. Normally this would not be my choice of session; modelling is interesting but usually it is too hard for me to understand and when there are 4 sessions running in parallel there is something more pressing for me to see. But today was an exception. My friend Martin Rohrmeier was presenting his PhD work in computational modelling of melodies and I wouldn’t miss that for the world! Martin’s work looks into the nature of implicit memory for melodies. The perception of music depends to a large extent on our background of acquired musical structures…

OK, show time! The end of Day Two was marked by the Amusia session… and by the Amusia session, I mean my friend and colleague Dr Fang Liu and I giving our talks to a relatively small but lovely audience. I was especially happy to see some of the leaders in our field were there though including Gottried Schlaug and Simone Dalla Bella. It did nothing for my nerves, mind you, but it was nice to see them in any case! Fang started the session by presenting some of her fantastic studies of intonation perception and production in amusia, which have been published in Brain since we applied for this…