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** The Music and Science list is managed by the Institute of Musical Research (www.music.sas.ac.uk) as a bulletin board and discussion forum for researchers working at the shared boundaries of science and music. ** MESSAGE FOLLOWS: Dear All, Next Wednesday, 7th December at 3:00pm, Marcus Pearce will present the seminar 'Information and Neural Dynamics in the Perception of Musical Structure'. The talk will take place in room 207 in the Electronic Engineering building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS. Directions on how to access the building can be found at http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/about/campus-map.php. If you experience problems entering, the lab phone number is +44 (0)20 7882 5343 and if I am not available, anyone else in the lab should be able to help. If you are coming from outside Queen Mary, please let me know, so I can make sure no-one is stuck outside the doors. Details of future seminars can be found at http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/newsevents/researchgroupevents.php?i=12. All are welcome to attend. For those unable to do so, a video recording of the seminar will be made available online after a few days. If you wish to be added to / removed from our mailing list, please send me an email and I'll be happy to do so. Wednesday's seminar (7th December, 3:00pm): Title: Information and Neural Dynamics in the Perception of Musical Structure Speaker: Marcus Pearce Abstract: Leonard Meyer (1956) distinguished designative meanings, whereby musical structures refer to externally to non-musical events, from embodied meanings, where musical events refer, through psychological processes of implication or expectation, to other musical events. Meyer argued that embodied meanings are capable of producing affective states in the listener. Our goal is to understand the psychological processes involved in generating these embodied meanings using dynamic probabilistic models of expectation in cognitive and neural information processing of musical structure. We have developed dynamic probabilistic models of melodic prediction that use variable-order contexts, long- and short-term musical structure and combine information from multiple musical features in predicting note attributes such as pitch, onset time and duration. We have also developed a novel information-dynamic model based on the concept of predictive information rate, which measures how much information is gained by current observations about the future, but which is not already known from past observations. We use our information-dynamic models to make predictions about listeners' responses to music, which can then be tested empirically. We have shown, for example, that information-dynamic measures of surprise predict listeners' pitch expectations well. Notes whose pitches are improbable given the preceding context are perceived as unexpected and vice versa. These results generalise across a range of melodic contexts including single intervals, English folks songs, chorale melodies and English hymns and predict listeners' expectations better than existing rule-based models. Using EEG to investigate dynamic aspects of the neural mechanisms involved in musical expectation, we have shown that unexpected notes are associated with characteristic patterns of beta band activation and phase-locking at centro-parietal scalp locations. We have also used the information-dynamic models to predict other aspects of musical perception such as phrase segmentation. We hypothesise that grouping boundaries in music correspond to points where the context fails to inform the listener about the identity of the next musical event. This might happen when an unexpected (low probability) event arrives or because the listener is simply uncertain about what will happen next (high entropy). We have produced evidence to support this hypothesis both at the level of phrase boundaries and of high-level form. This work suggests a relationship between dynamic changes in perceptual expectations and the cognitive representation of musical structure. Bio: Educated in experimental psychology and artificial intelligence at Oxford and Edinburgh, Marcus Pearce received his PhD from City University, London in 2005, before continuing his research on music cognition at Goldsmiths, University of London. Following a year as a post-doctoral fellow working on neuroaesthetics in the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at University College London, he returned to Goldsmiths as a co-investigator on a EPSRC-funded project investigating information and neural dynamics in the perception of musical structure (http://www.idyom.org). He is currently lecturer in sound and music processing in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published widely on computational, psychological and neuroscientific aspects of music cognition, in particular on perceptual expectations and auditory grouping in music perception and production. Future C4DM seminars: Geraint Wiggins - QMUL Wed 25th January 2012 (Seminar details tbc) C4DM Website : http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/index.html -- Peter Foster Postgraduate Research Student Room 104, Electronic Engineering Bldg Centre for Digital Music Queen Mary, University of London Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK email: [log in to unmask]