Music & Language Studies

Music and Language II:
A conference in celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Lerdahl and
Jackendoff’s “A Generative Theory of Tonal Music”
July 10-13, 2008
Tufts University Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center
Boston, Massachusetts

This conference follows the successful conference on Music and Language
held at Cambridge University in summer 2007. The conference will be
hosted by Provost Jamshed Bharucha and the Office of the Provost,
Professor Joseph Auner and the Department of Music, and Professor
Robert Cook and the Department of Psychology. We invite participants
and presenters from all fields (music, psychology, linguistics,
cognitive science, anthropology, etc.)

Paper and poster submissions will be due by December 1, 2007. Further
details about the conference and the paper/poster submission form are
available on our website at: http://musicandlanguage.tufts.edu/

We will also be honoring Ray Jackendoff, Seth Merrin Professor of
Philosophy at Tufts, and Fred Lerdahl, Fritz Reiner Professor of Music
at Columbia University. This year marks the 25th Anniversary of their
seminal work, “A Generative Theory of Tonal Music.”

Program Committee:

Eric Clarke, Oxford University
Lola Cuddy, Queen’s University
Peter Culicover, Ohio State University
Ray Jackendoff, Tufts University
Fred Lerdahl, Columbia University
Betsy Marvin, Eastman School of Music
Lawrence Parsons, University of Sheffield
Aniruddh Patel, Neurosciences Institute
Isabelle Peretz, University of Montreal

Advisory Committee:

Jamshed Bharucha, Tufts University
Gottfried Schlaug, Harvard University /Beth Israel Hospital
Mark Hauser, Harvard University
Ellen Winner, Boston College
Tod Machover, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Mark Tramo, Harvard University

If you have any questions, please contact the Office of the Provost at
(617) 627-3931.

Bruce Richman of Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, passed away unexpectedly on October 4, 2007. He died of complications related to cardiac bypass surgery while on vacation in the Pacific Northwest. He was 61 years old. A native of New York City, Bruce lived for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Princeton University and earned an M.A. in English from Antioch University. Most recently he moved to Pennsylvania to build a new life with his fiancée.

Bruce was a committed father and loyal friend. He is loved by his family and friends for his beautiful mind, passionate soul, non-judgmental acceptance of others, unfailing kindness, and honesty. He filled any room with his booming voice (often in song), big gestures, and his unique, endearing, sometimes quirky personality. An unconventional person, he proudly retained his “hippie sensibilities” throughout his life.

Bruce was a brilliant man whose life’s work focused on the origins of language. He conducted ground-breaking study on the vocalizations of gelada monkeys, and theorized that there was a singing stage in the evolution of human speech and language. Bruce’s research was published in a number of professional journals, and he contributed to several books on language development. He loved teaching, and was equally comfortable helping his students with English, math, and science. He tutored, taught high school classes, and worked as a community college instructor for most of his life. In the past few years he enjoyed teaching English as a Second Language. He was in the process of writing a textbook to use songs and poetry to develop conversational English speaking skills.

Bruce was a broad thinker and had an incredible curiosity about the world around him. He started each day gathering current news from the internet, newspapers, and political talk shows. Before he finished his morning coffee he was filled with conversation topics – and opinions – for the day. And he shared them widely.

For Bruce, intellectual questions weren’t abstract, but charged with passion and full of real-world implications. He delighted in a range of music from Mozart to Fred Astaire to Aretha Franklin. He had the perfect lyrics at hand for nearly any situation life presented him. Though a complex person, Bruce savored the simple pleasures of everyday life. He could also be moved deeply by an opera aria, a newly-discovered section of a city, or a collection of outsider art.

Bruce found refuge in books of all kinds, in the eyes of his daughter, and in the arms of his fiancée. He was passionate about social justice. He embraced any belief he held or activity he undertook with a full measure of enthusiasm. As self-described “cockeyed optimist”, he thought that the world could someday become a better place. And he believed in new beginnings and the power of love.

Bruce is survived by his fiancée, Deb Trevellini of Penn Hills, PA and owner of Morninglory in Murrysville, PA; Debbie Pearl and his daughter Susanna Richman of Cleveland, OH; his sister and brother-in-law, Barbara and Ted Turk of Ambler, PA; his nieces and nephews; and life-long friends on the West Coast.

The family is very grateful for the expert and loving care given Bruce by the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) Hospital staff in Portland. It requests that memorial donations be made to a special needs trust for Bruce’s daughter: Trustee, Susanna Richman, SNT 3805 Woodridge Rd, Cleveland Heights, OH, 44121.

Speech Prosody 2008, in Campinas, Brazil has announced the call for papers.

Evolution of Emotional Communication: From Sounds in Nonhuman Mammals to Speech and Music in Man

Aims of the symposium: A fundamental trait of the communication system of all mammals is to convey emotions. Emotions are transmitted by non-verbal acoustic communication in all mammals. In addition, humans can make use of speech and music to transmit emotions. A central and as yet unresolved question is whether there exists an underlying set of rules holding across species, governing production and perception of acoustically conveyed emotions.

This interdisciplinary symposium provides a framework for discussing ongoing research in the field of behavioral, cognitive and evolutionary neurosciences. It aims at deepening our understanding of shared and unique principles important to reconstruct evolutionary pathways for emotional communication in the acoustic domain.

Organisers of the symposium: Prof. Elke Zimmermann and Dr Sabine Schmidt, both at the Hanover Veterinary University, and Prof. Eckart Altenmüller (Hanover University for Music and Drama.

Abstracts and Registration: Abstract submission deadline is May 31, 2007. For details regarding registration and the scientific programme, please see our webpage at http://www.eec2007.de

A new California chapter of the Applied Voice Input/Output Society is currently forming. Anyone interested in becoming involved, or in being informed of upcoming events, please contact jonathan at)musiclanguage.net.

The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia (www.pwias.ubc.ca) is hosting a 3-day interdisciplinary Exploratory Workshop June 21-23 in conjunction with the Vancouver International Song Institute (www.visi.ca), a new and unique interdisciplinary professional training program for the study of Art Song, at the UBC School of Music June 17-23. The title of the workshop is “Art Song Anima: Ambiguity, Authenticity, Augury”, convened by Professor Rena Sharon, Artistic Director of VISI, and Drs. Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, Linguistics, and Laurel Fais, Psychology. Its topics flow from an arts/humanities starting point on the first day (ambiguities and specificities in the setting of poetry to music), into discussion on day two of the phenomenology of speech/song intersections, comprising linguistics, vocal physiology, cognition, neuroscience. The final day will include consideration of song from a biocultural perspective, with presentation of data about the use of song in therapeutic environments such as Alzheimer’s’ care, and its evolutionary role in individual development of parent/infant communication and collective social ritual.

Jonathan G. Secora Pearl
Linguistics Colloquium, May 18, 2006
University of California—Santa Barbara

Abstract
Music and language are twin aspects of civilization, found in all known human cultures, across time and place, embracing us from our earliest days until the ends of our lives. Speaking and singing are found everywhere and everywhen. Wherein lies the distinction?

The greatest difficulty in answering this foundational question is that we are often deceived by written forms of music and language into believing our object dwells within them, rather than in the sounds that inspire them. On the page, these materials appear far more distinct than they do in sound. Text without context is a world without air; yet context alone remains the unanalyzable chaos of everyday experience. The trick is to find the balance between too much detail, and too little.

Read the rest of this entry »

The slide show and handout for Jonathan’s presentation at the 2007 annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS) in Siegen has been added to the website.

Call For Papers

Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship
When: July 27-29, 2007
Where: Brevard, North Carolina

Panel: “Disciplining Entrepreneurship in Music Higher Education”

America’s music schools are adopting entrepreneurship education at a steady rate. However, the lack of an accepted definition or conception of “entrepreneurship” has spawned a diverse range of curricular structuring. Concurrently, a lack of scholarship concerning these efforts has buttressed perceptions of “entrepreneurship education in music” as “business education for music students.”

With new and progressive literature on entrepreneurship emerging from the economic, cognitive and social sciences, many Music Entrepreneurship programs (and students) have yet to reap the rewards of this scholarship. As this field emerges, developing a solid intellectual foundation is critical to the success and sustainability of these efforts.

The Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship invites papers that address Entrepreneurship education in American music training. We are particularly interested in papers that explore:

1) Theoretical or philosophical structuring
2) Curricular and program design
3) New approaches to pedagogy
4) Interdisciplinary connections
5) Conceptualizations of “Entrepreneurship” in the context of Music training
6) Continuities and discontinuities of entrepreneurship education in business and arts curricula

Please send a 250 word abstract by email to archlute@mail.utexas.edu.
Deadline for abstracts is May 1, 2007. Papers will be limited to 10 minutes (approximately) 8 pages, double spaced. Inquiries concerning submissions are encouraged.

Attached are lecture notes, and the PowerPoint slide show from the talk “Music & Language: Parallels & Divergences” which was presented to the Cognitive and Perceptual Sciences (CaPS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on November 30, 2001.

Music & Language: Parallels & Divergences (.pdf)
Music & Language: Parallels & Divergences (PowerPoint)