|
Background and Goals
|
Institute of Philosophy,
Education and the Study
of Religions
Research Director for
The Aesthetics of
Music and Sound
and
Editor and Webmaster for
www.soundmusicresearch.org:
Cynthia M. Grund
cmgrund@ifpr.sdu.dk
Updates
Archive
for "Updates": Click HERE.
February 3, 2012:
Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound with
Composing as Adventurous Applied Science , presented by Jan Flessel, composer and instrumentalist, Thursday, February 9, 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for the seminar available HERE. This is the second seminar in a series of 13 seminars during the spring. For series information and updates, please see HERE
January 31 2012:
The spring semester 2012 begins on February 1, 2012 in Denmark, and we get off to a running start on February 2 in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound with On Sound Segregation and Music, presented by Jakob Christensen-Dalsgaard, PhD, Associate Professor, Center for Sound Communication, Institute of Biology, University of Southern Denmark on Thursday, February 2, 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for the seminar available HERE. This is the first in a series of 13 seminars during the spring. For series information and updates, please see HERE.
 December 31, 2011: The Aesthetics of Music and Sound wishes everyone a very Happy New Year and hopes that 2012 will be a healthy and rewarding year for all!
January is examination month at Danish universities and the spring term officially begins on February 1. Please watch the website for updates regarding activities during 2012.
 December 12, 2011: Concert: Thursday, December 15, 2011, 12 noon - 1 p.m. in Cafeteria 4, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Nu er det jul with Nikolaj Nottlemann, tenor, and Cynthia M. Grund, piano. Concert poster available HERE. Concert program available HERE.
December 12, 2011: Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound, Thursday, December 15, 2011, 2:15 -4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55. 5230 Odense M. Sigrún Lilja Einarsdóttir, PhD student in Sociology – University of Exeter, England; Part time lecturer – Bifröst University, Iceland. Presentation via Skype: Bach in Everyday Life: ´Choral Capital´As Well-Being and the Socio-Musical Identities of Amateur Choristers Who Perform Art Music. Abstract available HERE. Poster for the seminar available HERE.
December 7, 2011: ArtsIT-Second International ICST Conference on Arts and Technology, December 7-8, Esbjerg, Denmark. http://artsit.org/show/home
November 25, 2011:Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound, Thursday, December 1, 2011, 2:15 -4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55. 5230 Odense M. David Clowney, Associate Professor, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey, USA presents a talk entitled Limits, Risks and Accomplishment in Musical Performance. Via Skype. Abstract available HERE. Poster for the seminar available HERE.
 November 18, 2011: Concert: Thursday, November 24, 2011, 12 noon - 1 p.m. in Cafeteria 4, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Pianist and Professor William Westney plays a program of Bach, Scriabin, Albeniz and Brahms..Concert poster available HERE. Concert program available HERE.
November 18, 2011:Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound, Thursday, November 24, 2011, 2:15 -4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55. 5230 Odense M. William Westney (Texas Tech U) and Cynthia M. Grund (SDU) present a talk entitled David Hume's Theories of Beauty and Utility Applied to Issues of Musical Performance – A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue. Abstract available HERE. Poster for the seminar available HERE.
November 18, 2011: New Directions in Musical Performance. Workshop and seminar in the Concert Hall, Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Southern Denmark/Syddansk Musikkonservatorium og Skuespillerskole (AMDA/SMKS), Islandsgade 2, Odense, Denmark. 9:30 -14:00, November 21, 2011. For details, please see HERE.
November 14, 2011: Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound, Thursday, November 17, 2011, 2:15 -4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55. 5230 Odense M. We welcome Catherine Z. Elgin, Professor of the Philosophy of Education, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, who will present a talk entitled Two Dogmas and the Arts via Skype. Abstract available HERE. Poster for the seminar available HERE.
At 7:30 p.m. on November 17, 2011, William Westney will be giving a concert
in the Concert Hall at the The Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Southern Denmark (AMDA), Islandsgade 2, 5000 Odense C. William Westney is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Piano and Browning Artist-in-Residence, School of Music, Texas Tech University and was appointed H.C. Andersen Visiting Professorial Fellow at The University of Southern Denmark during the 2009-2010 academic year, affiliated with The Aesthetics of Music and Sound. Dr. Westney's program will include works by Bach, Albeniz, Brahms and Scriabin. For detailed program, please see HERE. For more information on Dr. Westney, please see HERE.
November 6, 2011: Concert: Thursday, November 10, 2011, 12 noon - 1 p.m. in Cafeteria 4, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Pianist Morten Heide plays a program of character pieces, the titles of which suggest that they have been inspired by the song of birds or the sounds of flowing water..Concert poster available HERE. Concert program available HERE.
The concert will be filmed for television broadcast and is followed by a seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound entitled: The Cognitive Semantics of Musical Tension with Jens Hjortkjær, PhD, Research Assistant, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. The seminar will take place on Thursday, November 10, 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for the seminar available HERE.
 October 29, 2011: Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound- Romantic Ballet: Features, Conventions and Narratives with Dr. Astrid Bernkopf, Programme Leader Dance Studies, Dept. of Performing Arts, Middlesex U., Trent Park Campus, London. Presentation via Skype. Audience participation via Skype also welcome. Thursday, November 3, 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for seminar available HERE.
October 7, 2011: Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound - Musicianship, Musical Interpretation, and Cultural Identity: Challenges for Philosophy and the Social Sciences with David G. Hebert, PhD, Professor of Music, Grieg Academy, Faculty of Education, Bergen University College. Presentation via Skype.Thursday, October 13, 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for seminar available HERE.
October 2, 2011: Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound - Goals for Cross-Disciplinary Research and Education in Music and IT with Dr. Barry Eaglestone, Senior Lecturer, U of Sheffield, UK (RetiredI). Presentation via Skype.Thursday, October 6, 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for seminar available HERE.
 September 26, 2011: A TV-documentary in English about a Lunchtime Concert with pianist Gustav Krogh Hansen Piekut earlier this year at The University of Southern Denmark, SDU, at Odense airs throughout the week of September 26 - October 2, 2011 on ALT, Aabenraa Lokal TV on the TV Sønderjylland (TV-SDJ) network. The program will be permanently available HEREand during the broadcast week also HERE. In addition to concert clips, the program features interviews in which Gustav Krogh Hansen Piekut, Assoc. Prof. Cynthia M. Grund and Søren R. Frimodt-Møller, PhD participate.
September 24, 2011: Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound -
Norms of the Performance Context with Søren R. Frimodt-Møller, PhD. Thursday, September 29 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for seminar available HERE.
Public lecture in fulfillment of the requirements for the magister degree. Stud.mag. Daniel Frandsen holds a public lecture addressing the following topic: Discuss the role played by authenticity in analysis of musical meaning and of musical value, taking into account considerations involving the connection between aesthetic value and ethical value. The lecture will be given in English and takes place on Friday, September 30 at 1:15 p.m. in U150, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M.
September 20, 2011: Musikkens og lydens æstetik: en tværvidenskabelig tilgang til nutidens Parnassus/The Aesthetics of Music and Sound: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to a Present-Day Parnassus with Cynthia M. Grund. Assoc. Prof. of Philosophy, University of Southern Denmark at Odense. Opening lecture for the fall 2011 semester, Netværk for Kvinder i Filosofiske Fag (KIFF), Friday, September 23, 2 p.m. - 4 p.m, Room 1467-517, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, followed by a reception. Poster available HERE.
 September 16, 2011: Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound - Immanuel Kant and Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought withTomas McAuley, PhD Candidate, Department of Music, King's College, London (via Skype). Thursday, September 22 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for seminar available HERE.
 September 16, 2011:
With all that has been going on as the fall semester gets off to a start, we neglected to include this important update! The website for JMM10, the tenth issue of The Journal of Music and Meaning www.musicandmeaning.net was launched on July 20, 2011. From this issue and onwards, JMM will publish articles as they become camera-ready - a publication strategy we call ”rolling publication”. Two articles are already online and more are on their way.
We are also delighted to announce that the Danish Council for Independent Research| Humanities (FKK) has recently renewed its support for JMM with a grant of 90,000 Danish crowns (ca. 17,000 US dollars at current rates of exchange) for 2011/2012, 2012/2013 and 2013/2014. All of us at JMM are very grateful to FKK for its continuing support.
 September 9, 2011: Seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound - Markerless Motion Capture withAlex Czarowicz, Vice President of Sales for Organic Motion, Thursday, September 15 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for seminar available HERE. The abstract for the presentation is available HERE.
September 2, 2011: Welcome back from summer vacation! Updates are now in the process of being uploaded throughout the site. Please pay special attention to the "kick-off" for both the lunchtime concert series and the seminar series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound on September 8:
Concert: Thursday, September 8, 2011, 12 noon - 1 p.m. in Cafeteria 4, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Tango quintet RABO DEL GATO plays a program of Astor Piazzolla's tango compositions. Concert poster available HERE. Flyer introducing RABO DEL GATO (in Danish) HERE.
The concert will be filmed for television broadcast and is followed by a seminar in the series Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound entitled: Lyric and Meaning in Tango’s Poetry with Claudio Cifuentes-Aldunate, Associate Professor of Spanish at The University of Southern Denmark. The seminar will take place on Thursday, September 8 2:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in U73, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M. Poster for the seminar available HERE.
June 26, 2011: Four-day multi-event in London June 30-July 3 on the occasion of the inaugural annual conference of the RMA-MPSG which will be held at King’s College London on 1-2 July 2011. See HERE.
Archive
for "Updates": Click HERE.
(Includes the description of the SDU-IFPR research program The Aesthetics of Music and Sound which initially appeared online in Danish as Musikkens og Lydens Aestetik during the fall of 2006.)
|
For several decades, philosophy of music or, more generally, humanistic research in music has concentrated on issues such as
the relationships between music and speech
the influence on local and global culture exerted by the immediate availability of music from virtually any time and place
the ways in which agents hear sounds as meaningful and representative, even when they come from the realm of what is usually thought of as “noise”
the ontological status of the work of music or more narrowly the status of the composition
And, more recently,
understanding processes in the minds of performing musicians and
inspired by the results of such investigations in music ensembles, getting a deeper understanding of human interaction in communities (or just person to person) in general.
Among the topics to which these considerations give rise are:
the extension and application of successful music teaching strategies to pedagogical method in general
expanding the techniques of music pedagogy by integrating those from other disciplines
assessing the implications of various approaches to music pedagogy with respect to expressivity, mastery, and individuality.
The Research Program The Aesthetics of Music and Sound, located at the Institute of Philosophy, Education and the Study of Religions, University of Southern Denmark, aims at shedding new light upon these questions by viewing music in terms of information and communication, aided by the tools under rapid development within information technology, practice-based research and the new perspectives arising within aesthetics as a result of new technologies for studying and producing music.
This line of thought has been developing for more than nine years in the Network for Cross-disciplinary Studies of Music and Meaning (NTSMB[1]) which has its base at the Humanistic Faculty of The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and was founded with a two-year start-up grant from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities in 2001-2003. The purpose of the present Research Program is to amplify this research with the work being done in the technological field of Music Informatics by researchers at Aalborg University Esbjerg (AAUE) and with the practice-based research of The Academy of Music and Music Communication, Esbjerg (VMK – abbreviation of the Danish name Vestjysk Musikkonservatorium; as of January 1, 2010, the Academy of Music and Music Communication, Esbjerg, has merged with The Carl Nielsen Academy, Odense/Det Fynske Musikkonservatorium (DFM) and The School of Dramatic Arts at Odense Theatre/Skuespillerskolen ved Odense Teater (SkO) and the new entity is entitled Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Southern Denmark/Syddansk Musikkonservatorium & Skuespillerskole (SMKS) with facilities in both Esbjerg and Odense).
Music Informatics and its more specific subdiscipline Computer Music Modelling and Information Retrieval deal in short with making computers recognize, synthesize and play music. The projects 1b-c and 3b-c (see the “Projects” tab) will sketch how this research deepens our understanding of human interaction through music.
Practice-based research is an important topic for the Research Program in three different areas: I) when studying the work of music ensembles, a study which must have actual performances and rehearsals as its material, II) the research of the potential strengthening of students’ learning capacities bymeans of the skills acquired through musical education and experience and III) when trying to find ways of comparing the knowledge and skills obtained by musicians and composers to the more discursive knowledge paradigm of the academic world. There are recent and ongoing attempts in Denmark to place conservatory educations on an equal footing with those offered by universities. This provides some interesting challenges, in that the performing, composing and listening skills developed within conservatory environments don't necessarily fit in well with the more discursive sorts of knowledge commonly prized within university milieux. How should the knowledge which is clearly implicit in a fine performance by a concert musician or a piece written by an accomplished composer be made discursively explicit - or does the academic world need to expand its own horizons with regard to its own ideas regarding the nature and communication of knowledge? If the latter is the case, how can this be done without sacrificing rigor, clarity of thought or quality of argumentation? The Aesthetics of Music and Sound is fortunate enough to be able to draw on the expertise of Finnish philosopher Tere Vadén, who is a leading force in the area of performance-based research and will be full-time affiliate with the center. Tere Vadén has worked in philosophy of science, in general, and on the question of the identity and role of science in contemporary society, in particular. These interests all seem to converge around artistic research.
. . . . What we see and hear is a need for carefully argued for criteria, principles and guidelines that are situated in both qualitative research and artistic practices. We have to keep in mind that even though artistic research has certainly been produced at various moments over the last twenty years, the research methods in the different fields of art and artistic expression – from music via design to theatre and from the visual arts to visual culture – are still only in the process of evolving, both in themselves and in relation to other artistic traditions.
[…] The question is, how and within what framework should artistic research be carried out? (Hannula, Suoranta and Vadén 2005, p.11)[2]
It is important that researchers involved in the rapidly evolving traditions within computer music modelling and information retrieval do not become engrossed only in the – often very absorbing – problems which arise in this field as the tools themselves become more complex and theoretically sophisticated, thus risking loss of contact with the culture and practices of the world which they are trying to understand by means of models and simulations. Conversely, it is important that musicians and composers are updated as to the wealth of possibilities for new kinds of examination of even the most traditional forms of musical practice opened up by new digital technologies and the new kinds of questions, the framing of which are inspired by these technologies.There are, indeed, now resources which warrant the development of new types of musicology, and, although traditional musicology will certainly always have a place on the academic map, those researchers who are deaf to the new technologies may well find themselves engaging in a form of academic re-enactment rather than bona fide research. A similar remark holds for humanists in general: questions of what “meaning” is, and what characterizes human communication, tends to be so bound up with language in the minds of many philosophers and theorists that the matter of whether or not music or any sort of sound-for-sound’s sake may be meaningful or viewed as a form communicative tool too often simply receives a negative answer. What is far more fruitful and exciting is to recognize that – whatever conceptual understanding we have gained regarding “meaning” – people do find music and sonic art “meaningful” – and important, and further that music does play a part in our communication (imagine a language without intonation or melody or a classic Hollywood film without a score!), a part that must be further examined.
A large number of unusually versatile and experienced people in the milieux outlined above regularly meet to share in each other’s work and expertise in the contexts of NTSMB, The online journal JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning[3], the ISMIR[4] and CMMR[5] conferences, and NNIMIPA [6]. A continually growing list of international network partners is kept up-to-date on this site on the "Links" page.
The Aesthetics of Music and Sound also has the strength of the geographical proximity of the three Danish institutions SDU (which also has a campus in Esbjerg), AAUE and SMKS, each of which contribute substantially to the work being done in the program. This does, of course, by no means rule out collaborations with other institutions as well. The Research Program The Aesthetics of Music and Sound is thus (and will continue to be) a real synergetic force field - something that can benefit other work being done at the respective institutions as well.
[1] Abbreviation of the Danish Netværk for Tværvidenskabelige Studier af Musik og Betydning; please see www.ntmsb.dk.
[2] For more information on Tere Vadén, see the tab “People”.
[3] A peer reviewed Internet journal initiated by the NTSMB; please see www.musicandmeaning.net.
[4] The International International Socieity for Music Information Retrieval; please see http://www.ismir.net/
[5] Computer Music Modelling and Information Retrieval; please see http://www.cmmr2010.etsit.uma.es/
[6] Nordic Network for the Integration of Music Informatics, Performance and Aesthetics; please see www.nnimipa.org.
|
|