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This project is part of a series of studies contributing to an interdisciplinary research agenda on musicality (Honing, 2022). The main aim is to develop a variety of methods to probe musicality in a variety of geographical regions.

The aim of this project is to create a formalized memory model for familiar music.

The minor Music, Culture, Cognition enables students to establish links between culture and cognition through the study of music across cultures (and potentially even across species). It offers a unique combination of cultural theory and methods from the cognitive sciences through a focus on music, its workings, functions and origins. You will be working with experts from the fields of both cultural musicology and music cognition.

In deze module maak je kennis met experimenteel onderzoek door zelf een bestaand onderzoek te herhalen.

This course addresses recent cognitive perspectives on music as a social, acoustical, psychological and cultural phenomenon.

This course addresses recent cognitive perspectives on music as a social, acoustical, psychological and cultural phenomenon.

The course provides an overview of current concepts of, and empirical findings about, musical rhythm in cognitive science.

In this course, we will learn to work specifically with audio data, the form of music most commonly consumed today, using the tools Spotify provides for working with its catalogue.

This course gives an introduction to music generation with computational methods. The course starts with the preconditions and foundations of music generation, such as the principles of computation and computational representations of musical objects. We then proceed to cover a range of approaches to generating music artificially, including historic and current ideas with a broad range of methods. The technical aspects of these approaches will then be related to topics such aesthetics and creativity.

In this course we survey different theories of the origins of music and language.

In the last two decades an important shift has occurred in music research, that is, from music as an art (or art object) to music as a process in which the performer, the listener, and music as sound play a central role. This transformation is most notable in the field of systematic musicology, which developed from “a mere extension of musicology” into a “complete reorientation of the discipline to fundamental questions which are non-historical in nature, [encompassing] research into the nature and properties of music as an acoustical, psychological and cognitive phenomenon” (Duckles & Pasler, 2001; Honing, 2006). These recent strands of music research will be interpreted in the context of the “cognitive revolution” in the humanities and the sciences. Next to an overview of the methods and techniques that became central to the contemporary musicologist’s toolkit, current developments will be discussed that explore what cognitive musicology can say about how music works.

Over the years it has become clear that all humans share a predisposition for music, just like we have for language. We all can perceive and enjoy music. This view is supported by a growing body of research from developmental psychology neuroscience and the many contributions from the field of music cognition. These studies indicate that our capacity for music has an intimate relationship with our cognition and underlying biology, which is particularly clear when the focus is on perception rather than production.

The aim of this course is to identify the cognitive, biological and mechanistic underpinnings for music cognition as key ingredients of musicality, to assess to what extent these are unique to humans, and by doing so providing insight in their potential biological origins. As such this course has the aspiration to lay a new, interdisciplinary and comparative foundation for the study of musicality.

In addition, this course will discuss recent developments in the research field of music cognition. Topics include a) the origins and evolution of musicality, b) the cognition of rhythm and melody, c) musical competence, d) relation between musical and non-musical abilities, and e) the similarities and differences between music and language. The topics might change due to recent developments.

In this course, students will work on an AI-related project in a small group of 3 to 5 students.

De studenten voeren in deze cursus een klein zelfstandig onderzoek uit met behulp van de methoden die in de cursussen Partituuranalyse en Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Music Studies zijn aangeboden. De nadruk ligt hierbij op analyse, veldwerk en empirische methoden, en minder op literatuuronderzoek. Na een eerste gezamenlijke bijeenkomst zal dit onderzoek door een van de docenten van begeleid worden.

Students will undertake an independent or small-group research project based on themes and methods discussed in the core modules and methodologies relating to one of the tracks: Historische muziekwetenschap, Cultural musicology or Cognitive Musicology. After an initial plenary session, each student or group shall work individually with one of the instructors to execute the research plan. In the course of the project and depending on the track, students will present their findings at a mini-conference. The course will conclude with a written report of the research findings.

Ervaring opdoen met het zelfstandig uitvoeren van een muziekwetenschappelijk onderzoek aan de hand van een zelfgekozen onderwerp en methoden op basis van de cursussen uit het afgelopen semester.