Finnish Centre of Excellence in interdisciplinary music research, Finland.

Abstract

The Finnish Centre of Excellence is an interdisciplinary research consortium funded by the Academy of Finland (2008 -2013) that explores the relationships between physical, perceptual, emotional, and social aspects of musical engagement. The research themes of the Centre consist broadly of emotions, movement, rehabilitation, and learning, all with respect to music. Within these topic areas, particular emphasis is given to perception of musical elements such as rhythm, melody, and timbre (including their neural representations); improvement of language learning; effectiveness of music therapy and various music interventions; development of computational analysis tools for music research; aesthetic experi- ences of music; music-induced movement (including rhythmic synchronization); emotion expression; and motor communication.Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0031008.suppAim of the CentreThe Finnish Centre of Excellence is an interdisciplinary re- search consortium funded by the Academy of Finland (2008 - 2013) that explores the relationships between physical, perceptual, emotional, and social aspects of musical engagement. The research themes of the Centre consist broadly of emotions, movement, rehabilitation, and learning, all with respect to music. Within these topic areas, particular emphasis is given to perception of musical elements such as rhythm, melody, and timbre (including their neural representations); improvement of language learning; effec- tiveness of music therapy and various music interventions; devel- opment of computational analysis tools for music research; aes- thetic experiences of music; music-induced movement (including rhythmic synchronization); emotion expression; and motor com- munication.The aim of the Centre is to achieve a critical mass of expertise that is able to combine different methods, approaches, and disci- plines in tackling the central research themes. The Centre com- bines theoretical backgrounds and methods from the fields and subfields of musicology, music therapy, psychology, movement science, music information retrieval, and cognitive neuroscience. The scope of methods used in the Centre is also wide and includes computational music analysis, behavioral experimentation, optical motion capture, various neuroimaging techniques, and longitudinal studies.Main Scientific ContributionsDuring the past 4 years, the Centre has produced 280 publica- tions, including 250 articles in refereed international publications. The publication forums include journals such as Brain, Cortex, British Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, NeuroImage, Neuropsychologia, Music Perception, PLoS One, PNAS, Psychology of Music, and Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain. This prolific publication activity has also been docu- mented in a recent bibliographical study on articles published in Music Perception (Tirovolas & Levitin &, 2011), which ranked Finland as the most productive country per capita in this journal, largely driven by members of the Centre. The most important research findings so far include the following: (1) regular music listening enhances recovery from stroke (Sarkamo et al., 2008); (2) music therapy alleviates depression (Erkkila et al., 2011); (3) infants are predisposed to move to the rhythm of music (Zentner & Eerola, 2010); (4) dance moves reveal personality traits (Luck, Saarikallio, Burger, Thompson, & Toiviainen, 2010); (5) first documented case of a new form of amusia, beat deafness (Phillips- Silver et al., 2011); (6) musical aptitude and training is linked to better second-language linguistic abilities (Milovanov & Tervani- emi, 2011); (7) brain encoding differs between sad and happy music as well as between instrumental music and songs (Brattico et al., 2011).The most important methodological innovations to date include the following: (1) a new functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) paradigm for studying neural correlates in a naturalistic listening condition (Alluri et al. …