Toronto, Ontario
Excited by developments in tuning during his lifetime, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote The Well Tempered Clavier in 1722 to explore the then-novel possibility of using all 24 major and minor keys. Widely recognized as a landmark composition, it has captured the hearts and minds of pianists, harpsichordists, and audiences for generations. From a music cognition perspective, it offers an ideal corpus for exploring the complex relationship between pitch height, modality, and timing – three cues known to be salient in the communication of emotion. Dr. Schutz will discuss new insights on the communication of emotion in music taken from this landmark composition as part of the Brain, Perception & Cognition group series of talks at Ryerson University (starting at 2:30 in room 943 Jorgensen Hall).
We move to the beat all the time by tapping our fingers, clapping our hands, and even dancing. Fiona Manning is currently researching whether this movement improves our timing abilities. The PNB Department invited her to share her vast knowledge as part of the the PNB Colloquium series—talks typically reserved for faculty members.
Through a partnership with the Scholarly Research Committee, we ran testing stations at PASIC (Percussive Arts Society International Convention) in 2013 and 2014 as part of a large-scale project exploring the effects of musical training on music perception. Across these years, lab members tested over 150 percussionists, and engaged in an outreach effort to explain the relevance of lab projects for performing musicians, educators, composers, and scholars alike.
Dr. Schutz gave two talks at Western University – the first was as the inaugural speaker on the 2015-16 Graduate Colloquium series titled Moving to Hear: How Musical Training and Movement Affect Our Perception of Rhythm. This survey reviewed a series of recent experiments exploring the complex relationship between musical training, types of body movement (finger vs. stick), and rhythm perception. Click 
Fiona Manning presented a talk at the University of Waterloo Department of Kinesiology seminar series in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences. This talk overviewed sensorimotor integration in rhythm perception, outlining Fiona’s work on enhanced perceptual benefits that are associated with synchronizing movement with external auditory stimuli.
During the 40 minute segment, Dr. Schutz discussed some of his music cognition research, played Bach’s Prelude in C minor from the Well Tempered Clavier, and answered questions from callers about music and the mind. You can listen to the program using the player below, or download it for off-line listening by “right clicking” the mouse on this link and choosing “save target as”.