The So Strangely Podcast

In western classical music, theorists have long argued (and mostly agreed) that individual notes of the major and minor scale have sensations associated, feelings often described in terms of tension, motion, sadness, and stability. Dr Baker recommends Prof. Clair Arthur’s paper “A perceptual study of scale-degree qualia in context” from Music Perception (2018) which describes testing these associatio...

This episode brings recommendations from the 2019 ISMIR conference at TUDelft in the Netherlands. A number of contributors, old and new, highlighted papers that had caught their attention. 

Note: At ISMIR, all accepted papers were presented via a short 4 minute talk and a poster. This arrangement made it possible to keep all presentations in a single track. All papers...

Finn interviews Composer and Machine Learning specialist Dr. Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang about the Music Transformer project at Google’s Magenta Labs. They discuss representations of music for machine learning, algorithmic music generation as a compositional aid, the JS Bach Google Doodle, how self-reference defines structure in music, and compare the musicality of different systems with example outputs.

Music Education doctoral candidate Ethan Hein recommends “Equity and Music Education: Euphemisms, Terminal Naivety, and Whiteness” by Juliet Hess, published in Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 2017. Ethan and Finn interview Dr. Juliet Hess about this study and whiteness in music education, and addressing ...

Host Finn Upham recommends “How Music Moves Us: Entraining to Musicians’ Movements” by Alexander Demos and Roger Chaffin, published in Music Perception, 2017. They interview Dr Demos about this study and adjacent issues.

Note: This interview goes fairly deep into the challenges of tim...

Postdoctoral fellow Sarah Sauvé recommends “Individual differences in rhythmic cortical entrainment correlate with predictive behavior in sensorimotor synchronization” by Sylvie Nozaradan, Isabelle Peret, and Peter E. Keller, published in Nature Scientific Reports in 2016. Sarah and Fi...

Four Music Science attendees of the 2018 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience join Finn to discuss their experience of the conference, their own projects, and other interesting research presented. PhD Candidates Avital Sternin, Andrew Chang, Dr. Keith Doelling, and Prof. Amy Belfi get into the neural processing of song, emotion and alzheimer’s, leadership in small ensembles, onset prediction in the auditory cortex and more...

Music tech and data science professor Brian McFee recommends Vocals in Music Matter: The Relevance of Vocals in the Minds of Listeners by Andrew Demetriou, Andreas Jansson, Aparna Kumar, and Rachel M. Bittner, published in the 2018 ISMIR proceedings. Brian and Finn interview Andrew Demetriou about this research combini...

Music Theorist Daniel Shanahan recommends “Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception” by Josh H. McDermott, Alan F. Schultz, Eduardo A. Undurraga, and Ricardo A. Godoy, published in Nature Letters in 2016. Dan and Finn interview Josh about the musical culture of the Tsimane people, adapting music cognition experiments for cross-cultural...

Music Theorist Mariusz Kozak recommends “When the Sound Becomes the Goal. 4E Cognition and Teleomusicality in Early Infancy” by Andrea Schiavio, Dylan van der Schyff, Silke Kruse-Weber and Renee Timmers

Music Theorist Bryn Hughes recommends Chris White’s “Relationships Between Tonal Stability and Metrical Accent in Monophonic Contexts“, published in the Empirical Musicology Review (2017). Bryn and Finn interview Prof. White about his sequence of perceptual studies on how tonal stability may inform metrical hierarchy and vis versa, ...

Data Scientist Vincent Lostanlen recommends Katherine Kinnaird’s “Aligned Hierarchies: A Multi-Scale Structure-Based Representation for Music-Based Data Streams”, published in the proceedings of ISMIR (2016). Vincent and Finn interview Dr. Kinnaird about this method for abstracting structure in music through repetition, how it has been implemented for fingerprinting on Chopin’s Mazurkas, and how Aligned Hierarchies coul...

Neuroscientist Amy Belfi recommends “White Matter Correlates of Musical Anhedonia: Implications for Evolution of Music” by Loui, Patterson, Sachs, Leung, Zeng, and Przysinda, published in Frontiers in Psychology (2017). Amy and Finn interview Prof. Psyche Loui about this study, its relevance to theories of the evolution of music, and music anhedonia more broadly.