What is music, and why did it evolve? How can we understand the unity and diversity found throughout the world’s music? Scientific attempts to answer these questions through cross-cultural comparison stalled during the 20th century and have only recently begun to make a resurgence.

In performing together, musicians create a shared, coordinated performance. Such ensemble performances are established dynamically and interactively, as well as through constructing and polishing a distributed notion of what the end-product of the musical performance should sound like.

In her 2016 book, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts, Pamela Potter identifies a wide gap between what research has revealed about cultural attitudes in Nazi Germany and what the general public persistently chooses to believe.

Making music in groups is a widespread human activity and a powerful medium for nonverbal communication, social bonding, and cultural transmission.
 

Improvisation is a defining feature of jazz music and a key component of jazz musicians’ musical identity. 

The term talent can be problematic when used in the context of musical development because of its biased association with the nature / nurture debate. However, we suggest a new definition of musical talent that is not partisan to either side of that debate but lends itself to empirical investigations of individual differences in terms of speed and ease of musical learning.

This paper wants to delineate the important concept of interculturality as clearly as possible. It therefore suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing hermeneutics, avoiding hermeneutics of total identity and of radical difference.

I will review my research exploring ecologically-based patterns called Natural Regularities, and the related visual and auditory biases that help observers to rapidly and efficiently parse scenes into meaningful objects.

The first part of the lecture concerns the theoretical framework for analysis of musical microrhythm and addresses some important aesthetic aspects of groove-based music. The second part is a presentation of the first results of empirical research into the perceptual center of musical sounds from the TIME project at the University of Oslo. Ultimately, the lecture will address some challenges linked to research into micro features of rhythm.

Unter dem Begriff der Distinktion verhandelt die Soziologie vielfältige Formen individueller wie kollektiver Besonderung.

Describing aesthetics experiences with scientific models is a complex task, but there seems to be an emerging consensus that three main areas contribute to psychological experiences of aesthetic stimuli: 1) elements of the aesthetic object itself, 2) characteristics of the person, and 3) situational as well as contextual information. Taking music as an example domain we will demonstrate rigorous approaches that allow the construction of empirical models within each of the three areas. 1) We suggest that the comprehensive computational analysis of stimulus features of aesthetic objects can be employed to describe relationships with psychological responses (Jakubowski, Müllensiefen & Stewart, 2016; van Balen et al., 2015). In addition we will discuss new strategies going beyond mere feature analysis to gain a deeper understanding of how elements of the aesthetic object are causally linked to perceptual and cognitive responses. 2) For assessing characteristics of the individual we advocate the use of modern psychometric techniques such as item response theory, automatic item generation and adaptive testing (e.g. Harrison, Collins & Müllensiefen, 2017). Through examples we’ll show how ambiguous empirical results are often caused by fundamental measurement problems and by ignoring individual differences. 3) In addition, we’ll present experimental approaches (Anglada-Tort & Müllensiefen, 2017) inspired by paradigms from behavioral economics (Kahneman, 2011) that aim to assess the degree to which biases and heuristics introduced through the situational context affect human judgements of aesthetic stimuli.
The unifying conceptual bracket of these approaches is a thorough understanding of causality (Pearl, 2011) and its implementation in experimental and observational research. Finally, we’ll make sure the talk will be more fun than this abstract is able to convey!

Musik wird heute im Alltag vorwiegend mit Hilfe von Audiomedien gehört. Diese sich wandelnden Technologien verändern seit über 100 Jahren, wie Musik klingt, wie sie in soziale Kontexte eingebettet werden kann und wie sich ihre Hörer dabei körperlich erfahren. Dennoch wird die Rolle der Audiomedien bei der Entstehung musikalischer Emotionen von der musikpsychologischen Forschung heute noch größtenteils ausgeklammert. Der Vortrag stellt dieser Forschungslücke eigene und fremde empirische Arbeiten transdisziplinärer Audiomedienforschung gegenüber, die versuchen, der spezifischen Rolle der Technologien für den emotionalen Musikgenuss auf die Spur zu kommen.

IDEA-Lecture mit Ralf von Appen

Dr. Ralf von Appen ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Musikpädagogik der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. Seine Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind Geschichte, Theorie, Analyse und Ästhetik der populären Musik sowie Musikästhetik und Musikpsychologie.

Ausgewählte Publikationen:
Der Wert der Musik. Zur Ästhetik des Populären. (= texte zur populären Musik Bd. 4). Bielefeld: Transcript

Die expressive Qualität von historischer Musik zu bestimmen, ist ein überaus schwieriges Unterfangen, weil sich kaum Zeugnisse ausfindig machen lassen, die die emotionale Erfahrung von Musik schildern. In dem Vortrag möchte ich ein geplantes Forschungsunternehmen vorstellen, das nach Wegen sucht, diese Schwierigkeit zu überwinden. Das Projekt soll historisch-interpretierende Verfahren mit Methoden der Digital Humanities verknüpfen, indem das Konzept des Musters Anwendung findet. Die Identifizierung von Mustern in der Orchestermusik soll es ermöglichen, die Aussagekraft der nur sporadisch vorliegenden Zeugnisse zu erhöhen.

Wolfgang Auhagen, Professor für Systematische Musikwissenschaft an der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.

Dr. Dagmar Danko lebt und arbeitet als Soziologin in Freiburg und Berlin. Sie ist Sprecherin des Arbeitskreises Soziologie der Künste innerhalb der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie.

Prof. Dr. phil. Jürgen Stolzenberg, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Einer seiner Schwerpunkte in Lehre und Forschung ist die Philosophie der Musik.

John Sloboda is Emeritus Professor at Keele and was a staff member of the School of Psychology at Keele from 1974-2008.

Prof. Dr. Wulf Schiefenhoevel ist currently Head of the Reserach Group "Human Ethology Group" at the  Max Planck Institute for Ornitology.

Werner Grünzweig ist Musikwissenschaftler und Leiter des Musikarchivs der Akademie der Künste.

David Hargreaves is professor of Education at the University of Roehampton and Froebel Research Fellow.

Eric F. Clarke is Professor of Music at the Oxford University.

Frank Russo, director of the SMART Lab in Ryerson University, is visiting the Department of Neuroscience on the 9-10^th of December 2015. On this occasion, he will participate in the IDEA lectures serials with the above talk.

Meinard Müller studied mathematics (Diplom) and computer science (Ph.D.) at the University of Bonn, Germany. In 2002/2003, he conducted postdoctoral research in combinatorics at the Mathematical Department of Keio University, Japan. In 2007, he finished his Habilitation at Bonn University in the field of multimedia retrieval writing a book titled "Information Retrieval for Music and Motion" (Springer). From 2007 to 2012, he was a member of the Saarland University and the Max-Planck Institut für Informatik leading the research group "Multimedia Information Retrieval and Music Processing" within the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction. Since September 2012, Meinard Müller holds a professorship for Semantic Audio Processing at the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, which is a joint institution of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and the Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen IIS. His recent research interests include music processing, audio signal processing, music information retrieval, and motion processing. Besides numerous research articles, Meinard Müller has written a comprehensive textbook titled "Fundamentals of Music Processing" (Springer, www.music-processing.de), which appeared in 2015.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Manfred Bierwisch über semiotische Bedingungen und Konsequenzen in Sprache, Musik und Bild.

Prof. Dr. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger über die Begegnung zwischen dem Wissenschaftsphilosophen Gaston Bachelard und dem Kupferstecher Albert Flocon.