Music Mind Machine: Cutting-edge research on Music and Dementia
Professor Renee Timmers talks about how 2021 is an exciting year for her research centre, Music Mind Machine.
The Department of Music is made up of a world-class team of academics and our students benefit from research informed teaching at the forefront of musical discovery.
Music Mind Machine research centre brings together researchers with a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, who share an interest in psychological processes that underly the perception, experience and production of music. The centre does research that is both fundamental and applied: for example, it investigates attribution of meaning and emotion to music, how this may vary depending on context and culture, which also has relevance to applications of music in therapeutic settings. As a platform enabling networking and interdisciplinary exchange it regularly organises events that are open to students, staff and external attendees. Below a sample of the upcoming activities.
1-5 February 2021. MMM hosted the ESCOM Winter School on Musical Ability. This virtual winter school is a collaboration with academics in Finland, Italy and Poland, plus invited speakers from Canada and Germany. Presentations and workshops are offered to attendees, who will also work on group projects investigating musical ability from different perspectives, including interpretations of musical behaviour in children, beliefs about musical ability in different cultures, and experimental studies investigating musical ability as a multimodal and embodied interpersonal skill.
From 1 February 2021.
MMM is very excited to be welcoming Dr Jennifer MacRitchie, who will start an ambitious Future Leaders Fellowship funded by the UKRI. With her team and collaborators, she will be developing musical interfaces to assist music making and engagement with music in older adults with dementia. For this research, MMM will collaborate with HELSI – the University’s institute for research on a healthy life span.
28-31 July 2021.
MMM will host the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. This is the main international conference in this field, which will be combined with the triennial conference of ESCOM. The conference will be held virtually across 4 time-zone clusters, collaborating with co-organisers in (from East to West) Australia, India, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Poland, South Africa, Colombia and Mexico. The theme of the conference is Connectivity and diversity in music cognition, focusing in on the relevance of connectivity for music cognition, as well as diversity in music cognition, including cross-cultural and individual variations.
Of specific interest may be the research MMM does in collaboration with Sheffield city partners, including investigating the impact of the Covid19 pandemic on the cultural ecology of Sheffield, investigating ways to use music to promote sleep, and mapping the diverse organisations in Sheffield that use music in one way or another to promote wellbeing.
