RITMO is well into its second term, and all the new doctoral and postdoctoral fellows are deeply immersed in their projects. The common areas are constantly buzzing with lively discussions, fostering a collaborative and highly interdisciplinary research environment.
One exciting opportunity about having a centre over many years is the ability to develop long-term collaborations that can be sourced to support various initiatives. We increasingly see how researchers help each other and establish new constellations to answer questions they would never have thought of alone. These conversations are also stimulated by the many guest researchers from near and far. The visitors bring fresh perspectives, innovative ideas, and delicious sweets to share in the kitchen area, adding to the sense of community.
In addition to its scientific contributions, RITMO also engages in developing innovative education concepts, dissemination initiatives, and institutional systems. Here, we draw on our unique position comprising researchers from three departments and faculties that do not otherwise collaborate much. This includes everything from handling software purchases to updating web pages, conducting Open Research in practice, and career development.
You can read about this and many other things in this year's annual report, in rhythm, time, and motion.
Alexander Refsum Jensenius and Anne Danielsen
RITMO at a Glance
Rhythm is everywhere, from walking, talking, dancing and playing to telling stories about the past and predicting the future.
Our heartbeat, brain waves, and other bodily cycles work through rhythm. Rhythm is a crucial aspect of human action and perception. Our human rhythm also interacts with the world's cultural, biological, and mechanical rhythms.
At RITMO, we research rhythmic phenomena and the complex interplay between the human body and brain. The central idea is to establish a link between features of rhythmic phenomena in the world and within the (embodied) mind. The aim is to understand our ability to perceive rhythm and how this affects our actions and experiences.
RITMO is a highly interdisciplinary centre that combines perspectives and methods from music and media studies, philosophy and aesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, and informatics. Our research employs state-of-the-art methods, including motion capture, neuroimaging, pupillometry, machine learning, and robotics.
Structure & Aesthetics Cluster
We investigate the structure and aesthetics of musical rhythm and time. We are interested in rhythmical experiences and practices and how these can provide insights into perceptual processes, meaning-making, and sociocultural contexts. We examine the role of rhythm, temporal structure, and timing in the experience of music, both in terms of its aesthetic dimension and the cognitive processes underpinning the experience.
Highlights
- Polak contributed to a large cross-cultural comparison exploring the universality and diversity of rhythm perception across 15 countries. By analysing how participants from various cultural backgrounds reproduce rhythms, the researchers identified common features in rhythm cognition, such as discrete rhythm categories at small-integer ratios. These findings suggest that while there are universal aspects of rhythm perception, cultural practices significantly influence the importance of different rhythm patterns for different musical cultures.
- The TIME project ended last year and focused on microrhythm, the subtle timing variations within musical rhythms. In a recent paper, Danielsen and colleagues highlight the importance of conducting interdisciplinary timing research across musical cultures and contexts to identify both aspects of auditory perception shared by all perceivers and how such basic perceptual processes are modulated by learn