Music: the Art of Sound, Motion and Emotion and its Effect on the Human Body and Mind

The goal of this satellite conference is to examine the effects of music on human biochemistry, physiology, and cognition and to suggest some ideas about how concepts from complexity may help us better understand and model these effects. Music is a complex cultural phenomenon, but at the same time its perception is based on general auditory cues such as timbre, dynamics, and texture, and on general perceptual principles such as grouping, scene analysis, pattern recognition and probability calculations (i.e., expectation). In music, more than in other art forms physical aspects are central to the artistic and emotional experience ranging from entrainment of bodily rhythms to the musical beat to motor representation of sound sequences in musicians. It is therefore no surprise that music processing engages diverse neural networks, some of which are shared by other cognitive processes such as memory and attention and some which seem to be music-specific supporting our ability to organize sounds in discrete and hierarchic structures. In the music satellite we aim to explore some of these phenomena, stressing the potential contribution of complexity studies to the understanding of the therapeutic aspects of music and its subcomponents, especially its complex rhythmic organization.

For a tentative schedule click here.

Invited Speakers:

• Donna Abecasis
• Hilla Ben-Pazi
• Jorg Fachner
• Eitan Globerson
• Jeff Hausdorff
• Talma Hendler
• Raphael Mechoulam
• Gil Weinberg

Organizers:

• Roni Granot
• Edwin Seroussi
• Helena Bogopolsky