Martin Nørgaard, Assistant Professor of Music Education at Georgia State University (GSU) - School of Music, Atlanta with students are visiting Center for Music in the Brain.

13.03.2018 | Hella Kastbjerg

1:00 Victor Pando, Ph-D- student at MIB: Clinical Applications of Music.

Music has great potential as an adjuvant in the treatment of several clinical conditions, from pain management to sensori-motor rehabilitation and improved sleep quality. Our current lines of research at MIB include: (1) the neural correlates of music-induced analgesia in patients with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain disorder, and (2) the neural correlates of experienced musical pleasure during rhythmic musical stimulation in Parkinson’s disease patients. Our findings may help future research in therapies using music, as it has shown to improve clinical condition, psychological well-being, and quality of life.

1:15: Huiwen Ju, PhD student, Neuroscience, GSU: Torus bifurcation in the auditory neuron model

In neuronal dynamics, at the transition between tonic spiking and bursting behavior, quasiperiodicity was observed in both real neurons and neuron models. From the view of dynamical systems, the quasi-periodicity can be caused by torus bifurcation. This talk will introduce the torus bifurcation in a Hodgkin-Huxley(HH)-type hair cell model which is the beginning point of the auditory processing, and other biological and mathematical models. Also, this talk will show how to obtain quasi-periodicity in a simple man-made model.

1:30 Christine Ahrends, Ph-D- student at MIB: Modulatory effects of tonality on reward-related decision-making

Research into gambling behaviour provides an important model to study human decision-making in an uncertain and reward-related situation. Human decisions are often irrational and subject to perceptual and cognitive noise. How exactly this noise affects decision-making remains yet to be investigated. Music is a well-suited stimulus to examine this under experimental conditions. This is ecologically relevant in that many real-world gambling environments employ background music. In the present study, we developed a cross-modal gambling paradigm combining a modified version of the Card Deck Paradigm (Hsu et al., 2005) with musical stimuli controlled for tonal uncertainty (Bravo et al., 2017). We hypothesized that participants would alter their decisions based on the content of the musical stimuli in the high uncertainty gambling condition (ambiguity or high risk), integrating auditory information in order to compensate for missing information to make a prediction. The study collected behavioural data of 78 healthy participants. As opposed to our hypothesis, results show that participants were significantly biased (p < .01) by the musical stimuli only in the low uncertain gambling condition, which coincided with shortest reaction times. This indicates that participants were more susceptible to confounding information from the non-relevant auditory domain in the low uncertain condition, while they were able to focus only on the relevant information in the high uncertain condition. Our results question the current opinion on increased bottom-up processing under predictive uncertainty and suggest instead that there might be a domain-specific integration of sensory information in the processing of uncertainty. Investigating how musical parameters affect gambling behaviour in a controlled lab-based setting can shed light on the complexity of human decision-making and the mechanisms in which it can be modulated by perceptual factors.

1:45: Samuel Holmes, PhD student, Music Education, GSU: The effect of group assignment on experiences of upper elementary students during a technology-mediated collaborative compositional activity.

There has been a significant amount of research on student collaboration conducted in school environments. In music education, a vast majority of the literature on collaboration has focused on creative activities, specifically examined in primary school settings. The use of technology in collaboration, however, is still relatively new, in terms of understanding collaborative processes through perceptions, interactions, and the quality of creative products. The purpose of this mixed methods research is to examine the experiences of upper elementary students’ in a technology-mediated collaborative compositional activity. Research questions included the following: (a) How do upper elementary students perceive collaboration in a group-based, technology-mediated music composition activity? (b) Is there a significant difference in students’ perceptions of collaboration based on their group assignment? (c) Based on group assignment, are there differences in the nature of students’ interactions in collaboration? And (d) How is the quality of students’ compositional products influenced by factors of collaboration? Results from a recently completed pilot study (N = 34) will be shared, including reliability analysis and descriptive statistics of the perceptions questionnaire, as well as initial open-ended question responses from participants.

2:00 Davide Ligato: Identifying the functional architecture of vocal motor control in the human brain.

The project will focus on the vocal motor control and proposes an original set of studies to address this understudied subject. These are aimed at scrutinizing the multisensory cortical mechanisms involved in controlling and monitoring vocal behaviour and their modifications related to individual experience/learning.

2:15 Quick Share: Alice Cojocaru, master’s student, Music Education, GSU: the inclusive music classroom.
Mozelle Cole, master’s student, Music Education, GSU: Evidence of aesthetic experience: A study of exemplary choral music directors

2:30 Marianne Tiihonen, Ph-D- student at MIB: Dynamical Systems Approach to Affect

Despite a long historical distinction, today it is widely acknowledged that emotion and cognition interact behaviourally. Yet, perhaps due to a gap between psychological concepts and the level of detail provided by neurobiological studies, similar distinction has been more difficult to demonstrate on the neuronal level (Pessoa, 2013). Dynamical systems approach has been postulated to be a model bridging this gap, which can be approached be understanding the emergence of affect on three self-organizing time-scales, those of micro, meso and macro (Lewis, 2005; Lewis & Liu, 2011). In my PhD project I address all three time-scales, yet I mainly focus on the micro scale with the highest temporal resolution. In an MEG study I investigate whether the visual and auditory cortices interact during perception of emotional stimuli. In a behavioural study it is addressed whether this assumed cross-modulatory effect is observable behaviourally, and whether it varies in dependence to the given task (liking and pleasantness judgements). Also, it is addressed, whether the micro scale is influenced by the participants preference of visual or auditory stimulation. With my PhD work I hope to contribute to understanding the emergence of affect from the perspective of dynamical systems modelling.

2:45 Quick Share: Lulu Wang, master’s student, Music Education, GSU: Teaching multicultural music in a globalized world

Ari Jones, master’s student, Music Education, GSU: iGEM: How Synthetic Biology Can Solve Real World Problems