This past fall I had the pleasure of returning to RITMO for a three-month research stay. Taking a desk in the Red Room, being in Oslo allowed me to work closely with Anne Danielsen and Rainer Polak on a number of ongoing and new projects.
Collaborations with Anne Danielsen
Anne and I finalized a manuscript, "There's More to Timing Than Time: Investigating Musical Microrhythm Across Disciplines and Cultures," which summarized the many strands of the TIME project, a project which involved the majority of RITMO's researchers(!); we are happy to report that this article will appear in the Winter 2024 issue of Music Perception. Anne and I also wrote, and then-rewrote a paper on p-center perception in the context of jazz and classical vocal music. This was/is a follow-up study to our "Sounds Familiar" paper, in which we had jazz, folk, and hip-hop musicians listening to the temporal placement of a wide range of sounds; in that study, we found some striking differences amongst these groups of expert participants when presented with long, complex sounds. The more recent paper is called “I Just Don’t Hear it That Way: Why Near Transfer Between Expert Musicians is Really Far Away.”
Initially our interest was to further document the effect of musical expertise on auditory perception, but in thinking about our results from both experiments, we were struck by the implications of the fact that expert musicians do not hear the "same" sounds the same way as a result of the acquisition of their expertise. For it is well known that musicians who are very good in a particular musical style or genre cannot readily adapt their playing/singing to other styles, even on the same instrument (e.g., jazz vs. classical piano). This is a puzzle for theories of cognitive and skill transfer, as moving from one style of music to another on the same instrument (or voice) largely involves the same set of cognitive and motor skills--a textbook example of "near transfer" In "I just don't hear it that way" we argue that the inability of expert musicians to shift musical styles may stem in part from the different ways they perceive the musical sounds they make. More broadly, it shows that high levels of expertise are highly specific, and it is precisely that specificity that may inhibit "near" transfer.
Anne and I also did some brainstorming regarding the interpretation of some old, yet puzzling data, and made initial plans for some future experiments regarding the grooviness of individual sounds, taking some inspiration from the Standstill project. Stay tuned.
Collaborations with Rainer Polak
Rainer Polak and I wrote a chapter for the forthcoming volume Musical Structure Across Cultures and Disciplines, edited by Mawaread Farbood and Dane Hardood, to be published by Oxford University Press. The aim of the volume is to bring together cognitive, evolutioinary, and empirical studies of music with anthropological and ethnomusicological studies of music--in other words, bringing these disciplines together to move music science away from its WEIRD origins. Our chapter ("The Cross-Cultural Study of Metrical Structure: A Tale of Two Authors") recounts the history of our reserach collaboration, showing how our work together has been mutually enlightening for music theory, music psychology, and ethnomusicology. Rainer and I also worked on a forthcoming cross-cultural empircal study of the "binary bias" for musical rhythms, which will involve participants in Mali, Norway, and (probably) Minnesota.
Photo: UiO
Working with other RITMO reserachers
In addition to these more specific projects and collaborations, I was also able to participate in several of the research group cluster meetings this fall, and I also had many informal conversations and brainstorming sessions with the PhDs, Post-Docs, and Researchers in residence at RITMO this fall, all of which were interesting and intellectually stimulating. Among these conversations, I discussed music genre categories with Abbigail Fleckenstein, aspects of rhythm tracking with Maya Dyhre Foldal, and parallels between musical articulation (sharp versus soft onsets) and consonant class identification with Sabine Leske.
Finally, while participating at the Tour de RITMO in early December, I unfortunately suffered a torn hamstring while skiing, which led to my slightly early departure from RITMO. At the end of that day, which I managed with the strong support of my colleagues (especially Anne and Ragnhild), after receiving medical treatment I returned to the retreat at Susj?en. When I arrived I was immediately surrounded by all of RITMO--my friends and colleagues--and I knew in way I had never known before what a special community RITMO is, and how lucky I am to be a part of it.
I look forward to returning to RITMO in the spring and summer of 2024 to continue these research projects (but perhaps not for skiing).