by Andreas Gernemann-Paulsen

Artistic Human-Robot Interaction-Design (AHRI-Design) is a methodological approach to realize cognitive science’s research paradigm of situated or embodied cognition within cognitive musicology to investigate social interaction in artistic contexts. Using New Media Art installations with robots as social environments to study cognition and social interaction not only challenges traditional scientific research and technical design methods but also artistic creativity. Physical computing and its iterative approach are helpful in creating such microcontroller based artistic environments. So tinkering is seen as a possibility to prototyping hard- and software to an interactive whole.

This workshop provides as a first step a practical introduction to the arduino UNO board. It aims to beginners in programming and working with microcontroller.

Requirements: no prior knowledge required. Please bring your own laptop with installed (as possible) ardunio-IDE (please not (!) the online IDE):
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/HomePage

by Doris Mücke

This workshop covers methods from the field of Experimental Phonetics and Laboratory Phonology. We will mainly focus on the acoustic and articulatory dimensions. We will show how to interpret speech data and how to incorporate them into dynamic models. Therefore, tonal, segmental and gestural measures are considered and discussed. In doing so, we will provide examples from typical and atypical speech and discuss how much variation is allowed before speech pattern breaks down.

by Martina Penke

The course provides a brief overview on how children acquire a first language. We will discuss empiricist and nativist positions on language acquisition as well as the logical problem of language acquisition. We will see which issues are generally agreed upon in modern approaches to language acquisition and which topics remain issues of debate. Departing from the role input as well as genes play in typical language acquisition, we will  then shortly explore and categorize atypical language development.

by Panagiotis Sakagiannis

Science builds models in order to explain and predict. Although theory and experiment have always advanced hand by hand, nowadays methods have become so sophisticated in both sides that researchers are sometimes identifying themselves explicitly as modelers or experimenters. This need not be the case. We will walk through basic principles and questions concerning biological modeling from molecules to neurons to populations, away from the specifics of computational implementations : why build a model, what to include, what part of the biological world does it capture, what are its implicit assumptions, how to evaluate it, who is it addressed to. A focus on comprehensibility, multi-level integration and interdisciplinary cross-talk.

Participants are encouraged to have a research question in mind that they would like to address through modeling. It needs not be very elaborate, not even from their own research field. The format of the workshop includes short intervals to think about specific issues concerning your modeling idea before discussing them with the group. Hopefully participants will benefit both from the presented examples and their own work during the workshop. Laptops are not needed.

by Sebastian Klaßmann and Timo Varelmann

Pursuing music research as computational musicology is a basic methodological decision to consider algorithmic thinking and it’s translation into actual computational models of music generation and processing a valid source of knowledge in musicology. It’s main application can be found in the vivid subdisciplines of music information retrieval, computational corpus analysis and within analytic, generative and neurocognitive models of music processing using artificial neural networks and rule-based systems for structural description (musical grammars). This workshop will serve as an introduction to our department’s infrastructure and methods in computational musicology research using an example taken from musical statistic corpus analysis. Our department has been using a Jupyter/Jupyterhub deployment since early 2018. Jupyter offers extended, interactive coding and presentation features that can be accessed by students and teachers of the department alike. In sum, Jupyter eliminates the need for local, single-user installations of programming environments in Julia/Python/R in favor of a centrally administrated programming hub that manages synchronization of software requirements and library dependencies for all members of our department. One core strength of Jupyter lies within the potential to function as an extension of physical courses by using virtual classroom mechanics for the distribution of course materials and exchanging ideas in research groups. In our workshop, we will be giving an overview of possible academic workflows with Jupyter / Jupyterhub. In an hands-on example, we will perform a corpus analysis of rock harmony (De Clerq & Temperley 2011) using R. Based on chord annotations that include chromatic intervals above the tonic, we will compute the frequency of occurrence of chords and chord transitions within the corpus. This analysis covers descriptive analysis, basic data management and programming strategy skills, such as loop structures and productive code annotations. Doing so, it addresses possibilities for literate coding in a Jupyter notebook environment. This workshop requires no prior experiences in programming, as we will be discussing basic computational structures and concepts during our session. Please bring your own laptop / tablet / other internet-capable device running a current-generation browser.

by Paola Mengotti

The workshop aims at providing an overview of the different methodologies and techniques commonly used in cognitive neuroscience experiments. The methodologies described will include neuroimaging (e.g., functional MRI and EEG), neurostimulation/neuromodulation techniques (e.g., transcranial magnetic stimulation), and computational modeling for the analysis of behavior.

For each methodology I will provide a general introduction of the basic mechanisms with particular focus in clarifying how these techniques can be applied to understand the connection between brain functioning and cognitive processes. In addition, I will present examples of recent studies using these methodologies to show how they can be effectively used to unveil the functioning of cognitive processes and their neural correlates.

by Uwe Seifert

Cognitive Musicology is musicology as cognitive science. Music-Readiness is a proposal for research on the evolution of the human music capacity.  The Mirror-System Hypothesis is a well-known approach to the evolution of language.
This workshop introduces to both music-readiness and the mirror system hypothesis. The role of music-readiness in cognitive musicology is discussed and new research on interaction and situatedness is briefly presented.

by Volker Struckmeier

Music and language are human activities that base on underlying structure systems of some type: Musical structures as well as linguistic structures are shaped by constraints or rules, and therefore display certain regularities in accordance with those restrictions: Not anything goes! Some of the regularities, and some restrictions, seem to be found across different linguistic and musical cultures, whereas others are obviously culture-specific.

In this workshop, we will address the structure-building capacity humans display in their use of natural language: What are the empirical properties of linguistic structures – and which types of rule systems can hope to represent (hopefully: explain) these kinds of structures accurately? We will also address the question of variation in language: Which kinds of properties vary between individual languages (plural) – and which seem to define language (singular) as a general human cognitive capacity?

This architecture of structural capacities and its outputs will also be compared to musical structures and their properties.