MCG MINUTES 2006

During the 2006 meeting of SMT in Los Angeles, members of the Music Cognition Group (MCG) met to describe our current work, to hear announcements, to hear a report from our subcommittee on program submissions, and to discuss David Temperley's THE COGNITION OF BASIC MUSICAL STRUCTURES. We also made some decisions about next year's meeting.

MEMBERS

Here (with apologies to any whose names I may have missed) is a list of those who attended that meeting: Bill Benjamin, Ira Braus, Tina Chancey, Diana Deutsch, Phil Duker, Roger Grant, Robert Hatten, David Huron, Linda Kaastra, Gary Karpinski, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, Daphne Leong, Justin London, Peter Martens, Christoph Neiderhoff, Eve Poudrier, David Temperley, Nicholas Temperley, Andy Warshaw, Kent Williams, and Jason Yust.

CURRENT WORK

Members listed the following topics, on which they are currently engaged in research: memory, expectation, David Huron's SWEET ANTICIPATION, epistemology, contextualizing rhythmic dissonance, an algorithm for pitch circularity without Sheppard tones, absolute pitch and tone language, grouping, musical hallucinations, anthropological approaches, ecological perception, cross-cultural experimentation related to emotion, animacy/agency cues, perception of pacing, musical gesture, locomotion-encoded musical patterns, memory and form, perception and projection of meter, polymeter, social and cognitive science of musical performance, probabilistic models of perception, and musical forces.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

David Huron announced post-doc at OSU, Bill Benjamin announced a project on auditory imagery, Linda Kaastra announced next year's CogSci meeting in Nashville, Justin London announced an upcoming meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and David Huron announced Empirical Musicology Review (David Huron says "just search the web for this online journal"). Each of those making announcements said that they would forward further information to our email discussion list.

SUBCOMMITTEE REPORT

Peter Martens reported on this year's efforts to enhance proposal submissions. A subcommittee of Ira Braus, Steve Larson, Peter Martens, and Scott Spiegelberg reviewed short descriptions of possible submissions on music-cognition projects for SMT 2007. The subcommittee found that while some of the "pre-proposal" suggested interesting topics, some seemed more likely to be programmed in sessions on topics other than music cognition. The subcommittee did not feel that the projects described in the pre-proposals could be joined to create an effective Special Session proposal. However, a suggestion for next year's MCG meeting did come out of the subcommittee's deliberations (see below)

BOOK DISCUSSION

The bulk of our meeting was spent discussing David Temperley's book THE COGNITION OF BASIC MUSICAL STRUCTURES. The book, which had won an SMT publication award, generated an interesting discussion. And the author was on hand to respond to questions about the theory and computer models described. The conversation was deemed so successful that we decided to do something similar next year (see below).

NEXT YEAR

We decided to split our next meeting (during SMT 2007) between discussing a particular reading (to be determined) and holding a proposal-writing/grant-writing/experimental-design workshop (in which all are invited to bring in descriptions of research projects for feedback). We'll use our email distribution list to organize the discussion and the workshop.

Steve Larson (steve@uoregon.edu)