Sharmila and Aimee receive travel grants from SEMPRE

    Aimee and Sharmila each received travel grants valued at €245 (CAD $370) from the Society for Education and Music Psychology Research (SEMPRE). This grant will go towards their travel and accommodation at the 15th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) in Montreal. The conference will take place this July and both students will be presenting their research findings. Congratulations, Aimee and Sharmila!  

 

SSHRC funds new project exploring music and emotion ($185,000)

This award is an Insight Grant supporting a new project, titled, “Moved by Music: Exploring emotional communication across two centuries of musical history.” This project will provide a new perspective on how today’s listeners perceive musical structure, which has changed and evolved over several hundred years. The grant provides $185,000 over 5 years of support for students, conference travel, and equipment. To learn more about SSHRC Insight grants, click here.  

Aimee Battcock Receives the Harvey E. Longboat Award

Graduate student Aimee Battcock secured funding from the Harvey E. Longboat Graduate Scholarship for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Students for her work on studying the perception of emotion in music.  This award strives to recognize and acknowledge the academic achievement and exceptional promise of indigenous graduate students at McMaster University.  Congratulations Aimee! 

 

McMaster Arts Research Board (ARB) funds projects on multi-limb movement and rhythm perception

This competitive internal grant will boost ongoing software development efforts in the lab.  Our sensorimotor integration research uses customized software to simultaneously record integrated information on the perception and production of rhythmic information.  We are working to ensure the integrity of timing information in this package as a step towards exploring multi-limb movements.  This award for $5,950 will help towards development of this novel tool, which could also be of use to other teams exploring the popular issue of sensormitor interactions in rhythm perception.  For more information please visit our ARB funding page listing each of the lab’s awards from this agency.  ROADS 

SSHRC funds new project exploring the communication of emotion in music ($75,000)

SSHRC logo This award funded a new exploration of music’s powerful ability to convey emotion.  The project, titled Across the centuries: Exploring the communication of emotion in J.S. Bach’s “Well Tempered Clavier”  offered opportunities for students at both the graduate and undergraduate level.  In addition to supporting projects touching on perception as well as musical analysis, it was used to begin exploring individual differences in interpretation of this iconic work, based on an in-depth analysis of tempos used in Glenn Gould’s performances of the pieces.  See here for more information about this project.

Dr. Schutz received the 2014 Young Innovator Award sponsored by Petro-Canada

McMaster University. Hamilton, ON

Petro-Canada_logo.svg This prize is given annually to celebrate the “achievements of an outstanding faculty innovator.”   This $25,000 award helped fund an initiative providing research opportunities for undergraduate students, who were able to contribute directly to multiple ongoing lab projects. Funds from this award were used to send students to several major music conventions to test professional and aspiring professional musicians.  The overall goal of this project was to better understand the relationship between musical training and musical perception.  It was also used to promote public interest in the growing field of music cognition (click here for more information).