April 2014 - News!

Conferences, Symposiums, Workshops     view all upcoming


AIRS News

  • Congratulations to Charlene Santoni (University of Toronto DMA student, yr. 2, and AIRS sub-theme 2.2 participant), who has won the 2014 NATS Foundation Vocal Pedagogy Award for the USA and Canada

The Award is in support of her dissertation, which will propose the implementation of instructional singing voice techniques in the rehabilitative voice therapy protocol for children with vocal fold immobility.  Charlene also teaches voice at McMaster University and is a research assistant at AIRS (Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing), and the Centre for Opera Studies in Italy (COSI).

Natural auditory environments contain multiple simultaneously-sounding objects and the auditory system must parse the incoming complex sound wave they collectively create into parts that represent each of these individual objects. Music often similarly requires processing of more than one voice or stream at the same time, and behavioral studies demonstrate that human listeners show a systematic perceptual bias in processing the highest voice in multi-voiced music. Here, we review studies utilizing event-related brain potentials (ERPs), which support the notions that (1) separate memory traces are formed for two simultaneous voices (even without conscious awareness) in auditory cortex and (2) adults show more robust encoding (i.e., larger ERP responses) to deviant pitches in the higher than in the lower voice, indicating better encoding of the former. Furthermore, infants also show this high-voice superiority effect, suggesting that the perceptual dominance observed across studies might result from neurophysiological characteristics of the peripheral auditory system. Although musically untrained adults show smaller responses in general than musically trained adults, both groups similarly show a more robust cortical representation of the higher than of the lower voice. Finally, years of experience playing a bass-range instrument reduces but does not reverse the high voice superiority effect, indicating that although it can be modified, it is not highly neuroplastic. Results of new modeling experiments examined the possibility that characteristics of middle-ear filtering and cochlear dynamics (e.g., sup- pression) reflected in auditory nerve firing patterns might account for the higher-voice superiority effect. Simulations show that both place and temporal AN coding schemes well-predict a high-voice superiority across a wide range of interval spacings and registers. Collectively, we infer an innate, peripheral origin for the higher-voice superiority observed in human ERP and psychophysical music listening studies.

  •  AIRS researcher Lauren Stewart, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, has written an article for The Australian about earworms that discusses Pharrell's song "Happy".   Pharrell Williams’s Happy is a case of music on the brain

For a pop song that contains all the musical and lyrical depth of a radio jingle, Pharrell Wil­liams’s Happy is showing remarkable longevity. More than three months since its release, the hit registered its one-millionth sale and became the longest running No 1 in Australia this decade, takings its place atop the ARIA singles chart for the 10th week. Happy is now tied equal second for longest running No 1 for this century.

Group content visibility: 
Use group defaults
taxonomy_term: 

AIRSPLACE

AIRS staff are working towards providing the results of Project research, so that information and research findings can be shared amongst the researchers and interested individuals.  Please direct any questions or comments regarding the AIRS Web site to the AIRS Information Technology Coordinator. Contact information can be found on our Contact AIRS page.