Music Psychology

Today, we had an engaging fNIRS workshop at RITMO. One of the tasks we explored was “hyperscanning,” a term that confused several of the non-psychology people present. I was also bewildered when I encountered this term for the first time, so here is a short blog post to explain what it is. What is Hyperscanning? The short answer is that hyperscanning is the simultaneous recording of neural or physiological activity from two or more people to study interpersonal brain dynamics. ...

One of my main goals while teaching MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music last semester was the integration of perspectives from musicology, psychology, and technology. The main point is to introduce the basics of music psychology and music technology, two disciplines that are quite distinct in most places, but which we at the University of Oslo have a tradition of combining. In this post, I explain the rationale. Three “logies” One of my main arguments is that we should consider the three “logies” involved in this course: ...

I see that the concept of “tempo octave” is being used by some researchers in the music information retrieval (MIR) community. This is a confusing term from a musical perspective. Here I explain why this is a bad idea. Octaves An octave is a core term in (Western) music theory related to describing intervals, relationships between two notes (and tones!) with a frequency ratio of 2:1. Here is an example of an octave: ...

Today, we had the PhD defence of Olgerta Asko at RITMO. Her research is super interesting in itself (check out this feature story for an overview). This blog post is following up on one of the points she made during her trial lecture that I hadn’t thought about before: the difference between generalisation, inference, and deliberation. Towards deliberation Olga argued that current AI—here understood as large language models (LLMs)—are based on generalisation. They extract patterns from a lot of data and apply them broadly. As we have seen with recent commercial products and as I have explored in many ways on this blog, LLMs excel at this task. ...

This semester, I have written a book with AI. I should emphasize the with in the previous sentence, because this has been an experience of co-creation between various large language models (LLMs) and me. This post details my approach to co-writing Sensing Sound and Music and reflects on the process. The need for a book The reason for my AI-based writing experiment was the need for a textbook for the course MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music at the University of Oslo. This is an introductory course for the bachelor’s students in our musicology program who want to major in music psychology and/or music technology. These are two distinct directions that are usually taught separately. However, at UiO, we have a strong tradition of combining psychological and technological perspectives on and with music (in the fourMs Lab and at RITMO), so I have argued that we need a foundation course showing the connections between the two disciplines. ...

At RITMO, we have several different disciplines working together. The three core disciplines at RITMO are musicology, psychology, and informatics. In addition, we have people working in philosophy, physics, computer science, biology, dance studies, and so on. This also means that we have several different publication cultures. In this blog post, I will reflect on the differences between them. The Paper Proceedings Culture My professorship is in music technology. I don’t know if music technology should be considered a discipline; it might be better described as a community of communities. Music technologists have different types of backgrounds and work in many different institutions. RITMO has music technologists from musicology (the Faculty of Humanities) and informatics (the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences). The latter builds on what I call a paper proceedings publication culture. Informatics, computer science, and various types of engineering are fast-moving fields that often publish in what is called “conference proceedings”. ...

I am happy to announce that the Research Council of Norway has awarded funding to establish RITMO Centre of Excellence for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion. The centre is a collaboration between Departments of Musicology, Psychology and Informatics at University of Oslo. Project summary 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 microoscillations of our nervous system to our heartbeats, breathing patterns and longer chronobiological cycles (or biorhythms). 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. ...

At the ESCOM conference a few years ago I heard about the Ollen Musical Sophistication Index (OMSI), which is a ten-question standardised test for evaluating musical skills. The test is the result of the PhD dissertation by Joy Ollen. When I first read about this test, I thought it would be interesting to have an interactive version available to use in studies. Fortunately, now I see that there is an online version available at the MARCS Auditory Laboratories,

A couple of weeks ago I came across the English word confluence. The Oxford dictionary informs me that this means “the junction of two rivers, esp. rivers of approximately equal width”. That sounds very poetic, and it gets even better when you combine it with humans and computers, as they have done in the call for FP7 FET projects: The initiative aims to investigate and demonstrate new possibilities emerging at the confluence between the human and technological realms. It will examine new modalities for individual and group perception, actions and experience in augmented, virtual spaces. Such virtual spaces would span the virtual reality continuum, also extending to purely synthetic but believable representation of massive, complex and dynamic data. Human-Computer confluence fosters inter-disciplinary research (such as Presence, neuro-science, machine learning and computer science) towards delivering unified experiences and inventing radically new forms of perception/action. ...

Stefania Serafin just held a great lecture on multimodal perception and sonic interaction design at the SMC summer school. It is fascinating with the differences in spatiotemporal resolution between the different senses: Spatial resolution eye — highest: very high spatial acuity (foveal acuity ≈ 1 arcmin), excellent for fine detail. tactile — medium: fingertip resolution ≈ 1–2 mm, good for textures and small features. ear — lowest: coarse spatial localization (degree-level accuracy), poor for fine spatial detail. Temporal resolution ear — highest: excellent temporal sensitivity (sub-ms to ms scale), great for timing and rapid changes. tactile — medium: temporal resolution on the order of a few ms to tens of ms. eye — lowest: relatively slow temporal processing (temporal integration ~50–200 ms; critical flicker fusion ≈ 50–60 Hz). Stefania showed a number of examples of the application of this knowledge in interaction design, one example being the tactile floor they are building at McGill.