Dear all,
We are happy to announce the final CRAM (Cognitive Research at McGill) session this term on Friday, April 12th.
Dr. Samuel Mehr is visiting from Harvard Psychology and will be speaking about universals in music perception and production (title and abstract below).
Additionally, Dr. Mehr is happy to meet with any students and faculty who are interested in discussing research. He will be available this week Wednesday-Friday (April 10-12). If this is something that interests you, please reply to this email with your availability and we will try to arrange one-on-one or small group meetings.
The talk will span from 12pm-1pm in room 735 of 2001 McGill College Avenue. All are welcome!
Be sure to also check out Dr. Mehr's CIRMMT talk: https://www.cirmmt.org/activities/seminars/samuelmehr
-- Dr. Samuel Mehr, Harvard Psychology Universals in music perception and music production
Theories of the origins of music claim that the music faculty is shaped by the functional design of the human mind. On these ideas, musical behavior and musical structure are expected to exhibit species-wide regularities: music should be characterized by human universals. Many cognitive and evolutionary scientists intuitively accept this idea but no one has any good evidence for it. Most scholars of music, in contrast, intuitively accept the opposite position, citing the staggering diversity of the world's music as evidence that music is shaped mostly by culture. I will present two lines of work that attempt to resolve this debate, so as to lay out the basic facts of the human music faculty. The first line of work shows that the musical forms of songs in 86 cultures are shaped by their social functions (Mehr & Singh et al., 2018, Current Biology); in new work, this finding replicates in large samples of infants and of people who live in remote, small-scale societies. The second line of work applies tools of computational social science to the recently-created Natural History of Song corpora (http://naturalhistoryofsong.org) to demonstrate universals and dimensions of variation in musical behaviors and musical forms (Mehr et al., working paper, https://psyarxiv.com/emq8r). Our developing understanding of the basic architecture of music perception and music production lays the groundwork for building a comprehensive cognitive science of music.
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Warm regards, The CRAM Team (Mehrgol Tiv, Kevin da Silva Castanheira, Anna Mini Jos, & Azara Lalla) See our website for more information: https://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/events-colloquia-0/brownbag-series