January 2015 - 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  
  

AIRS News  

• AIRS 6th Annual Meeting.  The AIRS 6th Annual Meeting (2015) will  take place in Nashville, Tennessee  (Music City, USA ☺) July 30-31, prior to the biennial meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) co-convened by Reyna Gordon and Elisabeth Dykens).  Abstracts for the AIRS Symposium will be requested by the end of February and a template will be provided for this as well as for interest in performing at the AIRS concert which will take place the evening of July 31.
  

  Dr. Ron Eavy, who is the chair of Vanderbilt's Department of Otolaryngology and director of the Bill Wilkerson Center for Otolaryngology and Hearing and Speech Sciences, has kindly agreed to serve as a liaison  between the SMPC local organizing committee and AIRS.  AIRS is looking forward to connecting with members of the renowned Voice Center and AIRS attendees.  The  dates July 31 and the morning of August 1 there will be some events for students, and the AIRS Policy and Planning Committee will be taking place on the evening of July 30. The SMPC conference itself will run from  August  1st, 1 pm to noon August 5th.

  Those attending the AIRS meeting will have the opportunity to present their research at SMPC by submitting abstracts through the SMPC website; deadline for submission has been extended to Feb. 13 at 11pm CDT.  Tentatively, please pencil in the dates July 30 and 31 on your calendar. The SMPC conference itself will run from July 31st 1 pm to noon August 5th. Those attending the AIRS meeting will have the opportunity to present their research at SMPC (by submitting abstracts through the usual SMPC channels), and AIRS will also be working with Jessica Grahn, the SMPC conference program organizer, to determine the possibility of including an AIRS event within the SMPC program itself (e.g., a special poster session on singing, a symposium, or singing performance event).

  Your thoughts and suggestion will be welcome as we move forward. Both the music and health industries are prominent in Nashville, and the Vanderbilt University community will also add a valuable context to this SMPC meeting, already plenty wonderful by itself (recall the last Ryerson meeting of SMPC!). 

  AIRS will also be working with Jessica Grahn, the SMPC conference program organizer, to determine the possibility of including an AIRS event in the SMPC program itself (e.g., a special poster session on singing, a symposium, or singing performance event).  Your thoughts and suggestion will be welcome as we move forward.  Both the music and health industries are prominent in Nashville, and  the Vanderbilt University community will also add a valuable context to this SMPC meeting.

• AIRS Holiday Greeting Song - AIRS wishes you a happy holiday, and a prosperous fulfilling New Year -  Click here to hear!  
  

• AIRS researcher Felix Neto announces a new paper: Can Music Reduce Anti-Dark-Skin Prejudice? A Test of a Cross-Cultural Musical Education Programme, Neto, F., Pinto, M. C., & Mullet, E., Psychology of Music (in press).
  

  Abstract: The study examined the impact of a cross-cultural musical programme on young Portuguese adolescents’ anti-dark-skin prejudice. 229 sixth-grade pupils who attended public schools in the area of Lisbon, Portugal, were presented with the Implicit Association Test (IAT) -- an instrument that measures the strength with which dark-skinned faces or light-skinned faces are associated with attributes that can be considered as negative or positive, and with a test measuring explicit anti-dark-skin prejudice. Half of the pupils were subsequently exposed, at school, to a six-month musical programme that included Cape Verdean songs and Portuguese songs. The other half was exposed to the usual programme. Measures taken at the end of the programmes showed a reduction in anti-dark-skin prejudice, either implicit or explicit, among pupils in the experimental group and no reduction among pupils in the control group. Measures taken three months later and two years later showed that the impact of the experimental programme was enduring.

  Acknowledgment:  This work was supported by Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing (AIRS) project. The authors would like to thank Margarida Machado, Helder Caramba, and Sérgio Oliveira for implementing the cross-cultural  musical program in their courses. Thanks are expanded to the Heads and personals of Escola Luisa Todi, Setubal, and of Escola Prof. Antonio Pereira Coutinho, Cascais, Portugal.

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

​Recent Publications

• Infants’ Preferential Attention to Sung and Spoken Stimuli, Eugenia Costa-Giomi and Beatriz Ilari, Journal of Research in Music Education, May 19, 2014, 0022429414530564   LINK
  

Caregivers and early childhood teachers all over the world use singing and speech to elicit and maintain infants’ attention. Research comparing infants’ preferential attention to music and speech is inconclusive regarding their responses to these two types of auditory stimuli, with one study showing a music bias and another one indicating no differential attention. The purpose of this investigation was to study 11-month-old infants’ preferential attention to spoken and sung renditions of an unfamiliar folk song in a foreign language (n = 24). The results of an infant-controlled preference procedure showed no significant differences in attention to the two types of stimuli. The findings challenge infants’ well-documented bias for speech over nonspeech sounds and provide evidence that music, even when performed by an untrained singer, can be as effective as speech in eliciting infants’ attention.