@ Goldsmiths
Music, Mind & Brain
Investigating the Music in our Heads – a One Day Symposium at Goldsmiths
Supported by the Leverhulme Trust
1st June 2015 – Professor Stuart Hall (PSH) Building, Room LG01
This event brought together experts in music cognition and neuroscience, spontaneous thoughts, involuntary cognition, memories and mental control, in order to discuss the everyday experience of "earworms", or having a tune stuck in one's head. The outcomes of the 3-year Leverhulme project awarded to Prof. Lauren Stewart were also presented during the symposium.
The program from the event is available below. Slides from the individual talks (where available) can be accessed by clicking a presentation title.
***The results are in! ***
For those who participated in the "Guess the Earworm" activity at the symposium, the average accuracy rate of all participants was 65.8%. So it seems human participants perform only slightly better than a computer algorithm at distinguishing commonly named earworm from non-earworm tunes (our algorithm acheived 62.5% accuracy). As a next step we plan to look at how musical training and familiarity influence performance on this task!
Program
8:45 – 9:00 – Welcome – Prof. Lauren Stewart and Dr. Daniel Müllensiefen
9:00 – 9:30 – Dr. Freya Bailes « Music in Mind? An Experience Sampling Study of What, When and Why »
9:30 – 10:00– Prof. Dr. Jan Hemming « How and why do practitioners (try to) achieve 'catchiness'? Preliminary results from an interview study among singer-songwriters »
10:00 – 10:30 – Prof. Lia Kvavilashvili « When do Christmas songs pop into your mind? Testing a long-term priming hypothesis »
10:30 – 11:00– Dr. Phil Beaman « Gumming up memory and other unwanted thoughts »
11:00 – 11:30 // Coffee Break //
11:30 – 12:00 – Dr. Ashley Burgoyne « Resurrecting the Earworms of our Youth: What is Responsible for Long-Term Musical Salience? »
12:00 – 12:30– Dr. Lassi Liikkanen « Earworms on Twitter »
12:30 – 13:30 LUNCH BREAK at Natura Café //
13:30 – 14:00 – Georgia Floridou –« Investigating individual differences within the earworm experience : The Involuntary Musical Imagery Scale (IMIS) »
14:00 – 14:30 – Dr. Nicolas Farrugia « Tunes stuck in your brain : neural contributions of auditory, spontaneous cognition and affective networks.»
14:30 – 15:00 Coffee Break
15:00 – 15:30 – Kelly Jakubowski « Investigating temporal and melodic features of involuntary musical imagery»
15:30 – 16:00 – Dr. Victoria Williamson –« How might we ameliorate an unwanted earworm »
16:00 – 16:30 - Dr. Renee Timmers + Ionna Fillippidi –« InMI as an unconditioned response: exploring the possibilities »
16:30 – 17:00 – Discussion (Prof. Andrea Halpern)
18:00 – Dinner for speakers at Meze Mangal (245 Lewisham Way, London SE4 1XF)