Monday 12 August 2013

The Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC 2013)


I just got back from attending my first SMPC conference here in Toronto. This biennial meeting of researchers investigating everything there is to learn about music cognition and perception was hosted by Ryerson University. A variety of researchers showed up this year, with substantial representative coming from labs in Japan, Germany, Slovenia, (as well as various other countries in Europe), the U.K., many different institutions in the U.S. as well as a large Canadian contingent.

This years conference offered many great sessions from perceptual research (pitch, timber, beat perception, neural imaging and modeling) to musical analysis, theory and sociocultural analyses. In addition to this, there were plenty of poster depicting the latest and greatest in music research coming out of many great labs. I myself presented a most discussing one of the projects our lab has been working on. 
 Here is the poster I presented:

SPMC 2013 Poster

Presenting was a great experience, it was a busy few hours, and I got a great chance to discuss my findings and theories with some of the leading researchers in the field! I met several young researcher and was able to gain good insight into the state of affairs in music cognition research.

The experience left me wishing this conference was an annual event, and not a biennial one. Looking forward to SMPC 2015!

-Mike