Summary
When we play music with others, we sometimes need to focus attention on one specific voice. For example, while playing in a band, we might focus attention on the percussionist during a rhythmically complex passage to help maintain the tempo. In this talk, we present a study that investigated selective attention in the context of a dyadic drumming task. We addressed the question of how the tonal and rhythmic properties of a noisy metronome and the opportunity for visual contact would affect drumming partners' abilities to selectively attend to and synchronize with each other. Our results show that the noisy metronome both impaired and improved dyadic drumming performance: When the metronome was playing, drummers synchronized worse but maintained their tempo better than they did in a control condition with no metronome. We conclude our talk with a discussion of the role of attention in timekeeping.
Laura’s bio
Laura Bishop is a Researcher at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion and the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. She completed her PhD in music psychology at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Australia, in 2013. Thereafter, she worked at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) in Vienna, Austria, first as a postdoc, then as PI of Austrian Science Fund projects on coordination and creativity in music ensemble playing. Her research investigates the social and cognitive processes involved in musical interaction using methods like motion capture, eye-tracking, and physiological measures.
Dongho's bio
Dongho Kwak is a PhD candidate at RITMO. As an audio/music technologist, Dongho has experience in digital audio signal processing, live & studio recording, live sound engineering, and sound design. In terms of research, he is interested in investigating the complexity of how the human body processes external acoustic stimuli (psychoacoustic: auditory loudness perception; biotechnology: in vitro cellular responses to mechano-acoustic stimuli). He is also a classically trained flautist and percussionist.