by Volker Struckmeier

Room: Musikwissenschaftliche Bibliothek

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.

by Cedric Boeckx & Rie Asano

Room: Alter Seminarraum

Comparative research on language and music evolution has quite much focused on the uniqueness questions such as “Which species display vocal learning and rhythm ability to the degree comparable to humans?” and “What makes musical rhythm unique?” for a long time. However, a priori uniqueness assumptions are harmful for any comparative approach. The current workshop, instead, focus on the mechanistic questions such as “What are the neural mechanisms underlying vocal learning and/or rhythmic ability in different species and how do they work?” as well as “How (if any) do vocal learning and rhythmic ability relate to each other in the brain?” to approach the ultimate question “How did they evolve?”.
As a starting point, we refer to the Kuypers/Jürgens direct cortico-ambigual connections hypothesis and the hypothesis that those direct connections were “exapted” or “duplicated” from the cortico-spinal tract, and thus have a motor control origin (Fitch, 2011; Jarvis, 2004). Recently, those hypotheses yielded some sort of consensus among researchers investigating the evolution of voluntary vocal control, i.e. one indispensable component of speech and song. Given such a consensus, what might be next steps? We explore this issue by discussing the relationship between vocal learning and rhythm ability.

by Genta Toya & Marvin Heimerich

Room: Neuer Seminarraum

This workshop introduces the concept of evolutionary simulation and computation using NetLogo. NetLogo is a programming and simulation environment for multi-agent based modeling and allows us to simulate natural or social phenomena interactively. Evolutionary simulation uses algorithms inspired by biological dynamics that evolve adaptively to an environment. There are three parts to the workshop:
1. Introduction to evolutionary simulation
2. A basic and interactive tutorial to NetLogo  
3. Example of evolutionary simulation in NetLogo
No experience in programming, agent-based modeling, or evolutionary simulation is required.

by Yoshiro Shimizu

Room: Musiksaal

Gagaku (engl.: elegant music) arrived in Japan around the 7th century. Now mostly recognized as a Shintoistic musical artform, due to its strong bonds with the Japanese Imperial Court, Gagaku came from China as one of many mostly Buddhistic artforms. It is a rare example for a musical tradition that has been performed continuously throughout the centuries.
This workshop will give an introduction to Gagaku, its history, its musical theory and some practical introduction into some of the instruments. Participants are welcome to have a glance into an – outside of Japan – seldomly performed part of Japanese musical culture and have the chance to have a hands-on experience.

by Andreas Gernemann-Paulsen

Room: Systematischer Arbeitsraum

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 Milan Hauke

Room: Klangstudio

Electroacoustic music brought new possibilities and challenges to composers and listeners, especially in questions of space. Not only the production studio changed, but also the listening situation. This is why we have a listening Studio for electroacoustic music in the institute. On basis of many sound examples, this workshop gives an insight in what electroacoustic music is, and why it causes such fundamental changes.