IDEA Lecture with Peter Keller:
Psychological and Social Foundations of Human Interaction Through Music

Making music in groups is a widespread human activity and a powerful medium for nonverbal communication, social bonding, and cultural transmission. While group music making is essentially a vehicle for affective and aesthetic expression, it can also be viewed as a microcosm of social interaction to the extent that it draws on a broad spectrum of sensory, perceptual, cognitive, motor, and emotional processes that support collaborative behaviour more generally in everyday life. My talk will address collective musical behaviour in terms of what it is (at a descriptive level), why we do it (at the level of adaptive functions), and how we do it (at a mechanistic level). With regard to psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms, I will give an overview of empirical studies that investigated the behavioral and brain bases of musical coordination using controlled laboratory paradigms and naturalistic musical tasks. The results of these studies delineate links between basic sensory-motor processes that enable individuals to anticipate and adapt to each other’s actions, aspects of personality including empathy, and social-cognitive processes that regulate the balance between psychological representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’.

Peter Keller is Professor & Research Program Leader: Music Cognition & Action. MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development. Western Sydney University. Fellow Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin.

Please note that the talk will be held in English.

The IDEA Lectures (Interdisciplinary Debates on the Empirical Aesthetics of Music) aim at bringing together internationally well-known researchers who discuss questions that relate to the production and reception of music from various perspectives. Musicologists from all branches of their discipline take part as do musicians, psychologists, cognitive scientists, sociologists, philosophers and ethnologists.

External guests are welcome.
Please call for registration 069 8300 479-201.