About the symposium
Begun in 2006, the SiCa Center for Arts, Science and Technology’s Symposium on Music and the Brain has become an internationally renown and respected interdisciplinary meeting of the world’s finest scholars, researchers and practitioners exploring the neuroscience of music.
Past symposia have focused on: brainwave entrainment - how the brain responds to rhythmic stimuli (2006), music, rhythm and the brain - the psychophysical and physiological effects of musical rhythm (2007), and emotion from a wide range of perspectives - including the role of pitch, rhythm, timbre, prosody and performance on emotional response to music (2008).
Symposium presentations draw from the most current research on music and the brain, and incorporate live musical performance. We look forward to your participation and attendance at the 2009 symposium. The schedule is available online. Symposium registration is free but required.
A Message from Jonathan Berger
Understanding purpose, interpreting intention, accumulating evidence, and formulating expectations constitute a sequence fundamental to virtually all aspects of human existence.
Among the numerous theories put forth amidst the recent flurry of speculation as to the evolutionary basis of music, one hypothesis proposes that music affords a framework for rehearsing components of this sequence.
The neurobiology of decision-making and of expectation-processing represents a growing area of inquiry in cognitive neuroscience. If, indeed, music’s purpose is, at least in part, a means for understanding temporal processing, it follows that investigating the neuroscience of music can provide useful clues to understanding the brain.
It further follows that the broadly pervasive presence of improvisatory aspects of music may be rooted in an adaptation that provides a playground for fine-tuning the sequence of interpretation and decision-making.
Whether or not one considers improvisation an adaptation, spontaneous creativity – the process of making time-critical decisions within a constrained context, and the reactivity associated with extemporaneous performance, including error handling and correction strategies, manipulation and violation of expectation in the time and pitch domains, and the implicit synchronization of thought that characterizes great improvisation all serve as excellent models for studying the neuroscience of formulating decisions and expectations.
Over the next two days we will explore aspects of improvisation and spontaneity in music with the aim of bringing together a broad view of the domain – incorporating scientists, musicologists, and practicing musicians.
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CAST Advisory Committee
Jonathan Berger, Professor, Music
Christopher Chafe, Professor, Music
John C. Chowning, Professor, Music (Emeritus)
Paul DeMarinis, Associate Professor, Art
Pat Hanrahan, Professor, Computer Science
William Hurlbut, Consulting Professor, Neurology
Clete Kushida, Associate Professor, Psychiatry
Vinod Menon, Associate Professor, Psychiatry and Neuroscience
Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Consulting Professor, Music
David Spiegel, Professor, Psychiatry
Patrick Suppes, Professor, Philosophy (Emeritus)
Blakey Vermeule, Associate Professor, English
David Wilkins, Lecturer, Symbolic Systems
Gail Wright, Associate Professor, Art
The symposium is sponsored in part by the Department of Music.
