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…

After lunch on the first day there was the first ‘emotion in music’ session, which contained three talks. I was hoping to see evidence for a move past the old methods of simply measuring people’s moods as they listen to different music, and indeed I was not disappointed. This session contained four different studies looking at very different methods in this growing field of study. 1) The first talk was on musical induction and persistence of mood and was given by Marjolein van der Zwaag.  Marjolein works for Philips who are apparently looking to develop a music player that responds to the mood of the listener by measuring basic bio-physiological…