What is this “music perception and cognition” publication?
I’d like to briefly introduce this Medium publication — i.e., collection of blog posts — by making two observations that were unrelated in my mind until a few months ago.
Observation #1: A lot of popular science writing/reporting is pretty lousy.
Observation #2: Something I really like about my job is that I sometimes get to teach small seminars on a topic that I find particularly interesting. In my department, undergraduate courses of this type start with “Advanced Special Topics:” which already lets you know that this will probably involve a professor assigning a bunch of readings from in their own research area. The “Advanced Special Topic” I’m teaching now (now being Fall semester of 2019) is on Music Perception and Cognition.¹
(Aside: I got to do it again in Spring of 2022! This post still seems right to me, though, so carry on.)
I’m really enjoying this seminar; it’s a bunch of smart people with different backgrounds discussing work that I’m interested in. But I do feel an occasional twinge of guilt. That is, what are (tuition-paying) students supposed to get out of a class like this? I think we’re covering a legitimately interesting set of topics, but I assume there aren’t that many jobs where being up to date on music perception/cognition research is all that useful.
Okay, well, one answer is that it’s not about the content, but rather about the skills involved. It probably is useful for students to get (more) experience reading / discussing / critiquing primary research articles. This might be especially true for students in this class, who are mostly honors students doing their own research projects.
I think this is true.
But I still feel a tiny bit guilty. Which leads me back to observation #1: people could be better at interpreting and effectively communicating scientific research, and this seems like it would be a really useful skill for many different careers.
So, this year, I’m asking the students in my seminar to write about some recent research on music perception / cognition for a popular audience. More specifically, for each of these posts, students are asked (well, required) to choose a recent research paper, write an engaging blog post² about it, and give feedback on one of their peers’ posts. Each student is then encouraged (okay, fine, required) to pick their two favorite posts that they wrote, incorporate the feedback they received, and then post them here.
So, for anyone who stumbles across this publication: these blog posts come from some bright students at U Maryland who were taking a seminar on music perception and cognition. I’ve found their posts really interesting so far, and I think you will too.
Note that I deserve no credit for thinking of this set of assignments; they’re based on ones developed by my colleague Maureen Gillespie, who does something similar with her Psychology of Language class. So I thank Maureen as well as Vicky Williamson’s music psychology blog (and also her quite good book, which we also read as part of this course) for inspiration.
For the students in PSYC 489x: thanks for the great posts so far! To help you publish your favorites, here’s basic info on writing a post, adding your post to a publication (i.e., this one), embedding content (audio/video, tweets, etc.), using footnotes, and various other tips and tricks. Happy posting!
[1] The University actually lists this class as “Musical Perception and Cognition,” but I don’t think that’s the right title. The class isn’t about, like, musically perceiving and thinking; rather it’s about the perceptual/cognitive foundations of musical behavior. This would probably be easy for me to fix, but I keep forgetting.
[2] Or a podcast or whatever else.
