December 2014 - News!

Conferences, Symposiums, Workshops     view all upcoming

• ISMIR 2015 - 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 26-30 October 2015, Malaga, SPAIN  LINK 
  

• The Art and Science of Improvisation, an international research Summer School,  8th-12th June 2015, Stord/Haugesund University College, Stord, Norway.  LINK  
  

• Ninth Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, ESCOM 2015, August 17-22, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK.  Notification of acceptances and opening of early-bird registration - February 23, 2015.  Deadline for submission of full-text papers to be published in the conference Proceedings is May 15, 2015.
  

• 2nd International Conference on Music and Consciousness, 14th-17th April 2015, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, UK.   LINK 
  

• Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS) conference, June 5-7, Ottawa; it will be held in collaboration with the annual convention of the Canadian Psychological Association.  LINK 
  

AIRS News  

• AIRS researchers Zheng Zhang and Rachel Haydon (editors) are pleased to announce that the L&L Special Issue on Language, Literacy, and Singing has been published, along with an editorial where acknowledgement of the support of the AIRS research project funded by a SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative.  A permanent link to this publication is now available on the AIRS website on the right sidebar under "Publications, AIRS Books and Journal Special Issues". 
  

• SSHRC 3rd  Annual Storytellers Contest open to graduate and undergraduate students in Canadian postsecondary institutions  LINK
  

​Recent Publications

• Recess as a Site for Language Play, June Countryman, Martha A Gabriel, L&L Special Issue on Language, Literacy, and Singing. LINK 
  

Researchers in this study adopted an ethnomusicology perspective to explore the playground language and music-making practices of children at nine Canadian school playgrounds over a two-year period.  Using non-participant observation the researchers found that school children (ages 5-12) engaged in multimodal and multi-vocal play as they manipulated language, chanted or sang with rhythmic speech, and combined language play with gestures and kinetic movements.  The authors suggest a link between children’s out-of-school literacies (‘languaging’ and ‘musicking’ on the playground)—where children are active agents of their own learning—and children’s potential in-school literacies.