MARCS Afternoon Colloquium (MAC): Professor Peter Keller

MARCS Afternoon Colloquium (MAC) (Room 3.G.55 - Building 3)

Professor Peter Keller

Topic: Music as a Microcosm of Human Interaction

Speaker:  Professor Peter Keller

Abstract:  Making music in groups is a widespread human activity and a powerful medium for nonverbal communication, social bonding, and cultural transmission. While group music making is essentially a vehicle for affective and aesthetic expression, it can also be viewed as a microcosm of social interaction to the extent that it draws on a broad spectrum of sensory, perceptual, cognitive, motor, and emotional processes that support collaborative behaviour more generally in everyday life. My talk will address collective musical behaviour in terms of what it is (at a descriptive level), why we do it (at the level of adaptive functions), and how we do it (at a mechanistic level). With regard to psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms, I will give an overview of empirical studies that investigated the behavioral and brain bases of musical coordination using controlled laboratory paradigms and naturalistic musical tasks. The results of these studies delineate links between basic sensory-motor processes that enable individuals to anticipate and adapt to each other’s actions, aspects of personality including empathy, and social-cognitive processes that regulate the balance between psychological representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’.

Thank you for your continued attendance at MARCS meetings.  Let's keep the momentum going.

MARCS staff and students are reminded that all meetings and workshops have an important role in building and maintaining the sense of community which is central to the success of MARCS as a cooperative and energetic research institute.  Your attendance is both welcomed and expected.

The zoom ID is: 627 146 998. Link to zoom https://uws.zoom.us/j/627146998