December 2016 - News!

AIRS News  

•  AIRS welcomes Dr. Ted Hewitt, President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, as he visits Prince Edward Island and the AIRS research facility at UPEI, among other SSRHC initiatives on the campus. Representative students, faculty, and partners are delighted to greet him and share information about their engagement in and contribution to the project. 
  

• The paper entitled "Identifying style-types in a sample of musical improvisations using dimensional reduction and cluster analysis"  by Blair K. Ellis, Heungsun Hwang, Patrick E. Savage,  Bing-Yi Pan,  Annabel J. Cohen, and Steven Brown has been accepted for publication in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.  The study describes a new approach to classifying improvisations.  The process has a number of steps, the first of which is based on the Cantometrics system of Lomax which led to the development of the CantoCore classification system in the laboratory of Steven Brown. The data to which the new techniques were applied were from the improvisations produced by participants in the AIRS Test Battery of Singing Skills. The work was completed in connection with the Master's thesis of Blair Ellis  with Steven Brown.  Blair had spent two summers with AIRS during and following his undergraduate degrees in music and psychology at Mount Allison University.  Bing-Yi Pan  did developmental work on the online AIRS Test Battery carrying out postdoctoral studies with AIRS.  Steven and Blair first connected met at UPEI when Steven  gave a keynote address and participated  in a summer workshop on the resilience of song at UPEI.
  

• Johan Sundberg invites all voice enthusiasts to organize events for  World Voice Day 2017 - anything public centered on the voice (lectures, public rehearsals, seminars, symposia, concerts) and these can take place around April 16, not necessarily on April 16; however,  the Global Vocal Concert will be at 19.30 local time in each time zone, moving by time zone around the world.  If you go ahead with this please mention the AIRS connection in your promotional material.  So far there have been 4 AIRS events over the last 2 years, but there can easily be many  more, especially with advance planning.
  

• Both Helga Gudmundsdottir and Lily Chen-Hafteck were on the program of a conference in held at the "New directions for performance and music teacher education: A symposium on university music education in China" held at The Arts College of Xiamen University,  Fujian Province, China. Helga's presentation was entitled "Strategies and challenges in forming an eclectic program in music teacher education" and Lily's was "Connecting music and culture in teacher education: enhancing students' musical and cultural understanding".  Both  presenters are doing much travelling this term as Fulbright Scholars - Helga now based at Columbia and Lily at the Hong Kong Baptist University.
  

• Please send items for next newsletter to airs@upei.ca
  

Conferences, Symposiums, Workshops     view all upcoming

• The Society for Music perception and Cognition (SMPC) San Diego, CA. 30 July - 3 August, 2017.  Submissions deadline   15 Feb, 2017.  LINK
  

• The Neurosciences and Music  - VI,  Boston, 15-18 June 2017.  Poster submission deadline: 1  December 2016  LINK
  

• Association for Psychological Science  Boston  25-28 May 2017. Symposium submission deadline  1 December 2016  LINK