And we're off: RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion

I am happy to announce that RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion officially started last week. This is a new centre of excellence funding by the Research Council of Norway.

Even though we have formally taken off, this mainly means that the management group has started to work. Establishing a centre with 50-60 researchers is not done in a few days, so we will more or less spend the coming year to get up to speed. The plan is that the faculty group will begin working together from January, while in parallel recruiting PhD and postdoctoral fellows. We aim at moving into our new spaces and having most of the people in place by August 2018, and that is also when we will have the kick-off party.

At least we now have a small web page up and running, and more content will be added as we move along. Here is a short summary of what we will be working on:

RITMO is an interdisciplinary research centre focused on rhythm as a structuring mechanism for the temporal dimensions of human life.
The research will be highly interdisciplinary, combining methods from musicology, psychology and informatics to study rhythm as a fundamental property that shapes and underpins human cognition, behaviour and culture.

Rhythm is omnipresent in human life, as we walk, talk, dance and play; as we tell stories about our past; and as we predict the future. Rhythm is also central to human biology, from the oscillations of our nervous system to our heartbeats, breathing patterns and longer chronobiological cycles. As such, it is a key aspect of human action and perception that is in complex interplay with the various cultural, biological and mechanical rhythms of the world.

RITMO will undertake research on rhythm in human action and perception, using music, motion and audio-visual media as empirical points of departure. Our core idea is that the human ability to experience the world and our actions as rhythmic, points to a basic cognitive mechanism that is in itself rhythmic in nature. The vision of RITMO is to understand more about this cognitive mechanism, and through this generate ground-breaking knowledge about the ways in which humans structure and understand the temporal dimensions of their life.

The centre is interdisciplinary and will combine perspectives and methods from music and media studies, philosophy and aesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, and informatics, using state-of-the-art technologies for motion capture, neuroimaging, pupillometry and robotics.

RITMO is to reveal the basic cognitive mechanism(s) underlying human rhythm, using music, motion and audiovisual media as empirical points of departure.

The research will be highly interdisciplinary, combining methods from musicology, psychology and informatics to study rhythm as a fundamental property that shapes and underpins human cognition, behaviour and culture.