Collaboration

Nature and Breadth of the Collaboration.

The AIRS collaboration of over 50 scholars represents Canada and 14 other countries across five continents. Building on many existing collaborations, AIRS scholars represent the fields of music (education, ethnomusicology, choral, technology), psychology (developmental, educational, cognitive, social), education (music, arts, drama), sociology/anthropology, linguistics, audio engineering and intellectual property law. Canadians represent Eastern Canada (Moncton, UNB, UPEI, Dalhousie, St. Francis Xavier Memorial,), Central Canada (Western, McMaster, Ryerson, Toronto, Queen’s, McGill) and Western Canada (Victoria, UBC, Banff Centre). Eminent scholars include five Canada Research Chairs, a UNESCO Chair, a Chair Emeritus in Musical Acoustics, a Chair in Music Education at the University of Washington, three directors or associate directors of music/mind research institutes, and world authorities on singing.  

The Director of AIRS is Annabel Cohen, a Professor of Psychology specializing in music cognition. She has initiated and led multidisciplinary, multi-institutional projects of comparable scope, relevant to this proposal. The CMTC (CFI $1.49M) project aims to determine the best role of media in education in a cultural context. The related Arts-Netlantic (Canadian Heritage $1.3M) project created a research network in New Brunswick and PEI of artists, humanists, and scientists to examine the opportunities of new media for artists and audiences. Cohen is an accomplished classical singer, a performing singer-songwriter, creator of a musical, and is completing a book Foundations of Music Cognition under contract with Cambridge University Press. She has organized a national and international meeting, published conference proceedings and is the new editor of the journal Psychomusicology.  Cohen’s work for AIRS will benefit from the excellent support of UPEI’s Music Department (including vocal artist/educator Sung-Ha Shin-Bouey), the interdisciplinary CMTC research group, and her own grant-funded Research and Training Laboratory in Music Cognition.

The Research Theme leaders represent a cross-section of international experts in social sciences and humanities, who stand for the best research in Canada and the world as leaders in singing, musical behavior, education, and culture. They include: Laurel Trainor, Director of the McMaster Institute for Music and Mind; Caroline Palmer, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuropsychology of Performance and Professor, McGill University; Andrea Rose, 3M Award winner in Music Education, Memorial University Artistic Director of FESTIVAL 500: Sharing the Voices International Choral Festival and Co-Director of The Phenomenon of Singing International Symposium; Godfrey Baldacchino, Canada Research Chair in Island Studies, UPEI; Rachel Heydon, Faculty of Education and pioneer in intergenerational learning in the arts. Others include senior scholars Harold Abeles, Pat Shehan Campbell, Graham Welch, Johan Sundberg, and  Sandra Trehub, who have shaped their respective disciplines of music education, voice sciences, and infant auditory/music development. Others are promising junior scholars establishing niches in singing research (e.g., Adachi, Chen-Hafteck, Ginsborg, Mang, Russo). In addition to the majority of Canadian scholars, are those from the US,  Brazil, England, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Iceland, Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia, including Ian Cross (Cambridge, UK, music-evolutionary theory), David Huron (Ohio State University, music acculturation, music databases), Stefanie Stadler Elmer (University of Zurich, analysis of children’s singing), Maija Fredrikson (University of Oula, children’s singing), Jane Ginsborg (Royal Northern College of Music, vocal education and performance), Mike Forrester (Kent, UK an experienced CHILDES-user welcoming this initiative specialized for his music research).

The governing structure will entail an AIRS Policy Executive representing the 5 themes, 4 geographical regions, digital library, and students. Chaired by the Director, with the Project Manager ex officio, it will approve policy and advise on database design and use. A smaller AIRS Operations Executive Subcommittee will develop policies and manage daily issues. Meetings will take place by videoconference over the Internet, using free Access-Grid software, hosted by UPEI which has the hardware to manage the conference. As a precedent, the CMTC Arts-Netlantic project ran biweekly videoconferenced meetings across institutions in a similar way. An Advisory Board of Directors will represent stakeholders from academic institutions, government, NGO’s, and industry. They will advise and will monitor progress toward the AIRS objectives as reported at the annual conference, attended by videoconference if not in person.  The Project Manager with knowledge of music, research methods, and project management skills will track day to day activities, see that goals are clear, communications are effective, meetings take place, and will assist the Director and team in meeting milestones. 

Partnerships with public/private sectors. Themes 1 and 2 require access to infants and children, through partnerships with maternity wards, daycares, schools, and institutions that offer musical extracurricular activities. Theme 3 and 4 requires access to schools and to institutions offering music instruction and depends on relations between AIRS and cultural associations and communities. Theme 5 requires the cooperation of homes and organizations for senior citizens, intergenerational choirs, preschools or public schools, persons taking voice lessons, and special groups for whom music may offer benefit.  AIRS will share findings with these groups. In addition, AIRS’ findings should interest government ministries of education, health, heritage, immigration, external relations, and tourism; educators in general, music educators in particular, the entertainment industry, and NGO’s that focus on ageism (e.g., Canadian Association of Retired Persons), the culture of peace (UNICEF), and mental health (Canadian Psychological Association, American Psychological Association). New theories arising from the project will relate to associations of music psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistics, education, sociology of music, health psychology. and digital libraries.

Roles for students.  Over 50% of the SSHRC MCRI support will go to support students. It should be clear from the previous description of student involvement outlined for each of the five research themes that AIRS will provide extraordinary opportunities for students. They will serve important roles on all aspects of the project. They will learn about digital libraries, behavioral research, music, and culture in an exciting multidisciplinary and international environment. They will participate in meetings and workshops.  Through years 2 through 5 there will be at any time the equivalent of  6 undergraduates, 6 masters students, 6 Ph. D. students and 2 postdoctoral fellows working on the project. (Equivalent refers to the possibility of partial funding going to more than one student). Students in music technology, computer science and psychology will assist the development of both the digital library and software for automatic analysis or querying of the database. Other graduate students and undergraduate assistants will code metadata.  An apprenticeship system  with more senior students mentoring  more junior students will leave the most senior students and post-docs, working closely with faculty, taking responsibility for research under a given theme. The access to rich data accumulating at different research sites, and involvement in a multi-institutional and multi-national project make this an outstanding learning experience.

AIRS will host workshops annually for training on the use of the database, and on protocols for collection, ingesting, transcription, and querying data.  AIRS researchers working on the same theme and on the same geographical region will meet twice a year, with one full AIRS group meeting a year and smaller workshops. Students will be full participants and will have exposure to scholars who would normally not be available to them. The students will be expected to present their work, archive an annual written report of their experiences with the AIRS project, indicating their annual accomplishments, learning, and next year’s goals. 

Training opportunities through interaction with AIRS scholars include advanced statistics and ethics (Bradley Frankland), audio engineering (Theresa Leonard), audio digital libraries (Fujinaga), voice synthesis and voice querying of databases (Tzanetakis); lieder (Sharon); voice performance (Ginsborg, Shin-bouey, Doyle), motion capture (Russo, Hauf), pitch analysis of children’s singing (Stadler Elmer); acoustic analysis of singing (Sundberg), infant directed singing (Trehub); infant song memory and rhythmic behaviour (Trainor); entrainment analysis (Palmer), CHILDES (Forrester, MacWhinney), linguistics (Cichocki), managing digital rights (Sundara Rajan), birdsong (Phillmore).