Music Psychology @ Leeds Group at the ESCOM 12 Conference
Between July 3rd – July 6th the 12th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 12) was held in hybrid format at the University of York with satellite hubs in Melbourne (Australia) and La Plata (Argentina). Many of us involved with the Music Psychology @ Leeds group attended the conference in York, between us presenting a combination of oral presentations and poster presentations, including collaborative projects.
Bruna Martins (1st Year PhD student) presented an oral presentation showcasing the results of their scoping review as part of their PhD project assessing the benefits of choir participation for homeless people, entitled “What is the evidence of the role of arts in promoting positive impacts on people affected by homelessness.”
Sarah Hambly (2nd Year PhD student) presented an oral presentation focussing on the theoretical framework that underpins her ongoing PhD work, entitled “Devising a Critical Disability Studies framework for exploring lived experiences of disability in music.”
James Cannon (2nd Year PhD student) presented a poster showcasing preliminary data from a pilot study as part of his ongoing PhD work entitled “How EDM Moves Us: Preliminary data from a mock-up club study.” James received lots of valuable feedback from delegates on analysis techniques used in the measurement of movement in live music research.
Scott Bannister (Postdoctoral Research Fellow) and Emily Payne (Associate Professor of Music) presented findings from their collaborative research on chills during musical performance, “A Survey of Musical Chills Experiences While Performing Music.” Scott also presented a poster showcasing findings from the EPSRC funded Cadenza project (which aims to improve the experiences of music for those with hearing loss) with Alinka Greasley (Professor of Music Psychology) entitled “Perceptual Evaluation of Machine Learning Systems to Improve Music Audio Quality for Hearing Loss.” Alinka also had a poster submission accepted, a collaborative project with Alice O’Grady (School of Performance and Cultural Industries) and Shauna Stapleton exploring participation of older women in electronic dance music. However, Alinka was sadly not well and could not make it to ESCOM to present the findings.
Freya Bailes (Associate Professor of Music Psychology) gave a talk in which she presented fresh findings from an experiment "Investigating the potential of an inhibitory response task to limit the occurrence of involuntary musical imagery". One of the findings was contrary to the hypothesised result, which led to some fruitful discussion with delegates regarding a possible explanation.
As a group, we also presented our collaborative replication project, led by Scott, “Felt and perceived musical emotions: A replication and extension of Kallinen & Ravaja (2006).” The poster received significant interest and Freya, Sarah and Scott took turns presenting our initial findings to curious delegates. This sparked many positive, productive conversations which will help to shape the direction for the project going forward!
Overall, Music Psychology @ Leeds was strongly represented at ESCOM 12 and the conference offered a fantastic opportunity to share and receive feedback on ongoing research projects and to connect with international peers and colleagues within the broad field of music science and psychology. Over the course of the four days there were there was a huge range of research presented by researchers at all career stages - an incredible amount of knowledge in one place and very inspiring for us all!
A big thank you ESCOM12 conference organising team and ESCOM committee.
by James Cannon.