Music Psychology
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SMPC Day 3: Session 2 (Structure and Syntax)
The mid morning of Saturday featured a neat little session called ‘Structure and Syntax’ but which might more accurately have been labelled ‘Rhythm’, since all 3 speakers were interested in the structure and syntax of the beat to our music (and, as we shall see, our speech). The first speaker was Ani Patel (Tufts University, USA). Ani introduced us to a new approach for the historical study of musical rhythm. I found it to be a very intriguing idea, as very little in the way of traditional scientific analysis is done on historical data. But in music we are of course blessed with many great volumes of musical score going…
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SMPC Day 2: Session 2 (Imagery and earworms)
The afternoon of Day 2 was to feature a session on earworms and imagery, where I was to give my talk on ‘Coping with earworms’. This would be the first public presentation of my group’s data on how people deal with the tunes that get stuck in their head, so I was nervous and anxious to see if a) anyone was interested and b) what people thought of the research. First however, I had the pleasure of sitting in on the presentation of my good friend Georgina Floridou (Goldsmiths, University of London) who was presenting her PhD work on the relationship between earworms and mind wandering. Georgina has a strong…