Music Psychology

The last thing I did on the Wednesday was to attend a talk on the development of a new test for measuring musicality. Why is this necessary? There is a growing issue in the literature in terms of how musicians and nonmusicians are defined. Typically the only measure that is the amount of formal musical training an individual has received in their life, measured in years. In the past this measure, even though not consistently applied across papers, has  successfully revealed replicable differences in behaviour and brain structure between ‘musicians’ and ‘nonmusicians’; but something is still missing. Such a dichotomous definition of musicianship does not take into account a person’s…

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…