The Music Cognition Group (MCG) of the Society for Music Theory met on Saturday, 11/8/03, during the annual meeting of SMT in Madison.

PRESENT (alphabetical): Devon Burts, Robert Gjerdingen, Ann Hawkins, Hubert Ho, Rebecca Jemian, Gary Karpinski, Smith Koester, Bill Lake, Steve Larson, Jenine Lawson, Justin London, Peter Martens, Betsy Marvin, Panos Mavromatis, Matt Pace, Tom Robinson, Nancy Rogers, Scott Spiegelberg, Christy Talbott, Valerie Weber, and Mark Yeary.

We began by introducing ourselves and listing current research interests.

INTERESTS (alphabetical): attention, categorization, cognitive constraints on the perception of structure, computer models, ear training, eighteenth-century music, embodied metaphor, expectation, linguistics, melody, memory, musical forces, parsing of tone rows, psychoacoustics, sequences, and timbre.

We discussed the submission of proposals for Special Sessions. Questions were raised about the criteria used by the program committees for Special Sessions. Suggestions were made concerning how we might make cognition papers (and especially the discussion of statistics associated with them) understandable by the audience we hope to attract at SMT meetings. Successful previous Special Sessions were recalled. The virtues of bringing specialists from outside SMT in as respondents or speakers were mentioned.

SPECIAL SESSIONS: After discussing a number of possible topics for Special Session proposals, we decided that our previous intention (to propose special sessions for Seattle on computer models and on rhythm and meter) might best be incorporated into a broader plan. Scott Spiegelberg and Panos Mavromatis will contact this list soon with details about the process they will use to organize proposal(s) for Special Session in Seattle.

We also discussed other venues for the presentation of music-cognition research. Members were encouraged to forward calls for papers for such presentation venues directly to this list.

Thanks to all for a productive meeting!

Steve

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Steve Larson
Robert M. Trotter Professor of Music
University of Oregon
School of Music
1225 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1225