This week MTRB is featuring a guest post by Krystal Demaine MEd, MT-BC, who attended the Neurosciences and Music IV conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. This conference was subtitled Learning and Memory and brought together Neuroscientists, Neurologists, Musicians, Music Educators, Music Therapists, and Researchers in fields of music cognition and perception. Learn about current international research in this two-part guest post.

Edinburgh castle

The Neurosciences and Music IV, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK in June 2011, was a conference dedicated to the exchange and presentation of research produced by the partnership of neuroscience and music.  The event generated the fourth meeting of its kind, with its first held in 2000 in New York, followed by Venice in 2002, and Montreal in 2008.  This event is organized by the Luisa Mariani Foundation located in Milan Italy.  The theme of the current meeting was Learning and Memory.  Subthemes included Infants and Children, Adult Musicians and Non-Musicians, Disabilities and Aging-Related Problems, and Therapy and Rehabilitation. The four-day conference included nine symposia, three poster sessions, two workshops, and a keynote lecture.  There were nine symposia which took place in a beautiful large assembly hall at the New College of the University of Edinburgh, while over 240 posters were presented in the historic library of the Old College in three individual evenings.  Symposia and presentations were studded with two servings of high tea and evening social events that encouraged eating, dancing, and three diverse musical performances laid at local venues across this vibrant city.

Presenters spanned the globe, and included experts and emerging researchers in the fields of neurosciences and music.  Day one (June 9, 2011) of the conference opened with two afternoon workshops, the topics included Experimental Methods and Social Real World Methods. The first workshop on Experimental Methods included presentations by Amir Lahav, Laurel Trainor, Sandra Trehub, and Nadine Gaab.  Their talks highlighted models for auditory protection for neonates, imaging protocol for children, models for measuring plasticity, and behavioral methods for children.  The second workshop was on Social Real World Methods which presented models and outcomes for music culturally diverse educational settings, with groups, and in conflict zones.  The speakers included Stefanie Uibel, Maria Manjo, Katie Overy, and Nigel Osborne.

Day two (June 10, 2011) began with a Keynote lecture on Human Memory by Alan Baddeley.   The first series of symposia then followed and continued for the duration of the conference.  The topic of the first of the symposia was Mechanisms of Rhythm and Meter Learning over the Life Span. The speakers included Erin Hannon, Devin McAuley, and Henkjan Honing.  Their presentations collectively highlighted the human neural processing of rhythm and beat perception among children and adults.  McAuley and others noted the multiple timing systems in the brain that engage the basal ganglia, and various pre-motor, and motor areas of the brain that are involved in speech perception.  McAuley pointed out that adults commonly have a beat based advantage (BBA), however individuals with Parkinson’s disease often lack this, thus these individuals often have trouble internalizing a beat.

Symposium two was titled the Impact of Musical Experience on Cerebral Language Processing.  The speakers included Nina Kraus, Daniele Schon, Martin Meyer, and Mathias Oeschlin.  Aniruddh Patel was a scheduled speaker, but was unable to attend the meeting.  Kraus highlighted the neural response to speech in background noise, and that speech recognition in noise is better with musical training. Meyer questioned if musicians better understand spoken language, and found that musical training positively effects phonetic perception.

Symposium three concluded the second day of the conference with the topic of Cultural Neuroscience of Music.  The presenters included Laurel Trainor, Peter Vuust, Mari Tervaneimi, Edward Large, Steven Demorest, and Patrick Wong.  Some highlights included Tervaneimi’s works on comparing musicians who are experts in different genres and how they recognizing melodic mistakes compared to non-musicians.  Vuust, noted that jazz musicians have larger miss matched negativity (MMN) which he suggested may be due to the active listening involved in jazz improvisation.

Part 2 of this conference update will be posted soon.