Musical Expertise
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Musical times, they are a-changin’…
Hello, dear reader. This week I thought I would write about the changing world of defining and measuring musicality. Once upon a time it was a simple case of asking someone how many years they had been training as a musician. Maybe you might stretch to how often they had practised in the past or now. But essentially, that was it; one or two numbers which defined an individual’s musicality. And we learned a lot using this method. If it did not work, if it did not throw up fascinating group differences, then it would have disappeared a long time ago. But the fact is that it fostered decades of…
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Do you listen to classical music?
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Conference report: The impact of musical expertise
This week I have been to the British Psychological Society (BPS) Cognitive Section conference, thanks to a very helpful bursary from SCONET (UK Social Cognition Network and Training Scheme). The meeting was held at Keele University which is something of a Mecca for music psychology as John Sloboda worked there for many years. As part of the BPS conference, Alex Lamont had organised a symposium called ‘Cognition and Music’, which featured talks by herself, Philip Fine from the University of Buckingham and Cara Featherstone from the University of Leeds. I decided to travel to Keele the night before the meeting in order to be fresh and ready to go for…
