I started the year with a trip to Portugal, where I had been invited to give an open lecture at CEIS20, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Coimbra. The lecture, titled “Soft” and “Hard” research? Experiences from running a radically interdisciplinary research centre, was part of their series Eixos do Conhecimento Interdisciplinar (Axes of Interdisciplinary Knowledge) and connected to their new ERA Chair project MusicAnalytica. Given that I wrote about transitioning into new roles this year, it felt fitting to spend a couple of days reflecting on what I have learned from nearly a decade of directing RITMO and what I bring into MishMash.
From the softest soft to the hardest hard
At RITMO, we unite researchers from musicology, psychology, and informatics. We like to say that we work with methods spanning from the softest soft to the hardest hard: reading and writing books, interviews and questionnaires, sound analysis, eye tracking, motion capture, various types of brain imaging, machine learning, and robotics. Lately, some life science and physics have also snuck in.
In my experience, methods and data are the easy parts of interdisciplinary collaboration. Things get trickier with theory and terminology; we use the same words for different things (try asking a musicologist, a psychologist, and an engineer what a “gesture” is) and different words for the same things. Deepest of all lie the motivations. To be a bit tabloid: psychology is largely hypothesis-driven, informatics data-driven, the humanities ideas-driven, and engineers and artists making-driven. When a humanities scholar discusses a concept, the psychologist asks which hypothesis is being tested, and the engineer wonders why anyone would need a reason to build a robot beyond the act of building it.
Publication cultures differ too: the monograph in the humanities, the journal article in psychology, the proceedings paper in mathematics and engineering. None of these is inherently right or wrong, but if they are not discussed openly, they become sources of friction. That is also why we regularly run a coauthorship exercise at RITMO retreats; no group has ever agreed on the author list, which is exactly the point.
Stepping on each other’s toes
In the lecture, I presented my figure of different disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, and trans. Much of what is called interdisciplinarity is really multidisciplinarity, in which people collaborate but remain comfortably unchanged. Real interdisciplinarity begins when you step on each other’s toes, when you have to learn statistics you do not understand, or when you give up a cherished term. That is where the friction starts, but as Bruno Latour reminds us, the conflict of disciplines is not a brake on the development of science but one of its motors.
Collaboration can also be asymmetric. In my AMBIENT project, the dance anthropologist and the computer scientist each work in a multidisciplinary manner, while I, integrating their perspectives, work in an interdisciplinary manner within the same project. Being explicit about such differences helps avoid conflict.
Ready to talk about soft and hard research in Coimbra.
Radical interdisciplinarity
The Research Council of Norway uses the term “radical interdisciplinarity” for research that crosses faculty boundaries, and I gave some examples of how that has played out for us. Video analysis tools I originally developed for studying music and dance ended up, via a chance encounter at a science show, being used to detect fidgety movements in infants. Today, all Norwegian preterm infants are screened for cerebral palsy risk with a system that grew out of dance analysis. A conference dinner conversation about cells that allegedly grew differently when Mozart was played in the lab turned into a funded project on how sonic stimulation affects cell development. That project has since spawned three new life science projects on cellular motion capture and biological sonification.
I also presented MusicLab, our concept for doing real research at real concerts, which has scaled from single musicians to full symphony orchestras with sensors on every musician, motion capture on the conductor, and around a thousand audience members measured per concert. These are the kinds of things you can only pull off with a centre: a massive, concerted effort where twenty researchers each pursue their own questions within a shared experiment.
A coffee machine centre
Many people are curious about how we run RITMO, which brings together around 60 researchers to interact on a daily basis. When I am pushed to explain how the “magic” happens, my best example is to point out that we have put the coffee machine right at the entrance of RITMO. It is placed just 2 metres from the main door, in an open kitchen area, to ensure it doubles as a social space and meeting room. It is also right next to our administration’s offices, and further down the corridor are the shared offices of our doctoral and postdoctoral fellows.
The coffee machine is at the heart of RITMO.
The coffee machine thus becomes the natural meeting point for everyone and the best place to hang out and meet people. I cannot stress the importance of creating meeting points enough. There is no quick fix to creating interdisciplinary collaborations. They require that people meet and engage in conversation.
Right next to the coffee machine hangs our code of conduct. It was developed jointly at our first retreat and has been revised a couple of times since. It reinforces values of diversity and friendliness, creating an atmosphere where researchers feel safe to explore “strange things” and “cool projects” that emerge spontaneously from being together.
RITMO’s code of conduct hangs strategically next to the coffee machine.
Everyone who has tried to work interdisciplinarily knows that institutional structures function as “silos”, with departments and faculties having their own local cultures and reward systems. At RITMO, we spend significant administrative effort to level out such differences so that recruits from different departments have the same experience. In addition to coffee machine discussions, we have also developed some concrete exercises that we run at retreats:
Questions from the floor
The Q&A took up several themes I care about. One was employability: our PhD fellows live and breathe at RITMO but earn their degrees in a discipline, because most academic hiring is still disciplinary. Another was how one teaches interdisciplinarity. My answer is that you mostly cannot; you create an environment where people are exposed to it daily. I compared it to my trilingual family: my children speak three languages fluently because they hear them at home all the time. People become fluent in interdisciplinarity by being at RITMO, sitting in shared offices, and meeting a biologist or philosopher at the coffee machine.
There were also critical questions about AI and the music sector, which I agree with: producers and commercial composers are already losing work, copyright needs sorting out, and we must regulate the big technology companies. Yet I remain optimistic about performers; people still want to see real people on stage. These are exactly the tensions we will work on in MishMash, which I presented at the end of the lecture.
I call RITMO a “coffee machine centre”, so I appreciated that my Coimbra hosts also understood the importance of good coffee.
Beyond the lecture, I got to hear about ongoing research projects, discuss with the interdisciplinary music research team, and wander around one of Europe’s oldest universities. The historic hilltop campus, with its stunning views over the Mondego River, was a worthy setting for discussing how old disciplinary structures can meet new ways of working together.
Thanks to Grammarly for language improvements.