International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus14).

Abstract

7th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus14) took place at the Psychology Department of Goldsmiths, University of London. conference was jointly organized by students from the psychology department's Music, Mind, and Brain Group (2015; http://www.musicmindbrain.com/), Nicolas Farrugia, Georgia Floridou, Kelly Jakubowski, and Naoko Skiada, as well as by students from the Goldsmiths computing department, namely, Amy Fancourt and Justin Gagen. Under the supervision of Senior Lecturer Daniel Mullensiefen and Professor Lauren Stewart, the committee headed by Kelly Jakubowski organized a 3-day conference from September 18th to 20th, 2014. aim of the SysMus conference series is to bring together advanced students of and related fields. Thereby, the term musicology was introduced by Guido Adler (1885). In his article The Scope, Method and Aim of Musicology, he divided into a and a systematic branch, whereas ethnomusicology was regarded as part of at that time. Today is an umbrella term for subdisciplines such as empirical psychology, sociology, acoustics, physiology, and neuroscience that addresses the phenomenon of music from a general perspective (Gingras, 2014; Parncutt, 2007). term is nowadays more often used in European countries compared with English-speaking and non-European countries (Leman, 2008) and is primarily empirical and data-oriented.This year, 80 early career researchers attended the SysMus conference, which is so far the largest attendance in the SysMus series since its beginning in 2008 in Graz, Austria. large number of participants was also reflected in the diversity of topics that were presented, which included music psychology and attention; music, language, and education; music and emotion; rhythm and dance; music analysis, as well as historical and computational perspectives. conference included two keynote speakers, 19 spoken papers, 26 poster presentations, and a workshop given by Daniel Mullensiefen. Both abstracts and proceedings are available at the official SysMus14 conference Web site (http://ojs.gold.ac .uk/index.php/sysmus14/index).The Keynote SpeakersThe research presented by the two keynote speakers-John Sloboda (Guildhall School of Music and Drama, United Kingdom) and Barbara Tillmann (Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, France)-represented very different approaches to music psychology research. Whereas John Sloboda is working in a conservatoire environment tackling the improvement of audience- performer relationship with mainly qualitative research methods, Barbara Tillmann is working in a controlled laboratory setting investigating the neural correlates of a person's tonal expectations.More specifically, John Sloboda, whose keynote was entitled Musicians and Their Live Audiences: Researcher-Practitioner Collaborations Informed by Psychology, started by emphasizing the need to make music psychology research available and amendable for professional musicians. existential problem initiating his line of research in the conservatoire environment is the steady and relentless decline in audiences for live classical music over the past decades (30%). Considering the fact that there is no decrease in other areas of live performances, such as pop or rock music concerts, this decline has to be taken even more seriously. work described in his talk summarized 4 years of research, aiming to combine the interests and expertise of music psychologists with those of advanced music practitioners. Sloboda argued that the historical view that a performer is solely responsible for the quality of a performance (i.e., the strict and exact reproduction of a composer's intentions) is contributing to the steady decline of people attending classical concerts. He further proposes that live events vary on at least four dimensions, which can affect the attractiveness of attending a classical live performance (established repertoire vs. …