Connectionists: Connection Science Special Issue on "Music, Brain & Cognition"

[David R. Hardoon]

Connection Science Special Issue on "Music, Brain & Cognition"

Call for Papers

CONNECTION SCIENCE

Special Issue on

MUSIC, BRAIN & COGNITION

Music is one of the most widespread of human cultural activities,
existing in some form in all cultures throughout the world. The
definition of music as organised sound is widely accepted today
but a naïve interpretation of this definition may suggest the notion
that music exists widely in the animal kingdom, from the rasping
of crickets' legs to the songs of the nightingale. However, only in
the case of humans does music appear to be surplus to any
obvious biological purpose, while at the same time being a strongly
learned phenomenon and involving significant higher order
cognitive processing rather than eliciting simple hardwired responses.

Until recently, the issue of musical representation had focused  
primarily
on symbolic notation of musical information and structure, and on the
representation of musical performance. Research on how we represent
musical experience in the brain is emerging as a rich area of  
investigation
thanks to ongoing advances in brain-scanning technology such as EEG
and fMRI.

In particular music cognition models of three phenomena are of interest:
1) Emergence of categories in music and sound perception, 2) Attention
as a top-down mechanism of modulating perception, 3) Goal-directed
action in sound and music generation. How can machine learning be
used for simulating these processes? Graphical models, recurrent  
networks,
clustering and visualization methods have been suggested so far. In some
instances the question arises how modeling approaches from language
and vision can be transferred/adapted to music.


Submitted articles must not have been previously published and must not
be currently submitted for publication elsewhere.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
-Machine learning based models for learning the structure of music

-Models for predicting style of performers

-Analysis and models of fMRI/EEG/MEG scans from musical stimuli
(as opposed to simplistic auditory stimuli)

-Predicting music generated patterns in fMRI/EEG/MEG

-Strategies for embedding representations of musical experience into
generative music / performance systems

-Methods for generative musical performance and composition

-Generative music and/or performance systems based on models of brain  
functioning

-Similar and further models for learning and analysing the structure  
of music

-Computational models of cognitively inspired sound processing

-Top down control of musical processing of pitch, onset, timbre

-Models of musical memory, saliency, attention

-Models of music development and learning

-Computer aided sound design

-Models as above, applied to other domains (e.g. speech and vision) with
potential application in music

Submission procedure:
Manuscript should follow the standard guidelines of the Connection  
Science
journal. Guidelines for formatting papers can be found in the Guide  
for Authors at
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/ccosauth.asp
Manuscripts should be submitted to D.Hardoon at cs.ucl.ac.uk and hpurwins at iua.upf.edu

Important dates:
Manuscript submission deadline:     February 4, 2008
First notification:                                    April 21, 2008
Revised manuscript submission:      May 26, 2008
Notification of final decision:              July 7, 2008
Final manuscript due:                         August 4, 2008
Publication of special issue:              December, 2008 - Issue 4,  
Volume 20.

Guest Editors:
David R. Hardoon
Hendrik Purwins

Special Editorial Board:
Klaus Obermayer
Eduardo Reck-Miranda
Xavier Serra
John Shawe-Taylor

Contact:
David R. Hardoon
University College London
London, UK
e-mail: D.Hardoon at cs.ucl.ac.uk

Hendrik Purwins
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: hpurwins at iua.upf.edu

Information on the Special Issue are also available at
http://homepage.mac.com/davidrh/MBCworkshop07/Journal.html