CIMTR Public Research Lecture: Social-affective neuroscience of musical rhythm

Social and affective components are intertwined in music and cannot be separated. However, the relationship between musical features, affect, and social interaction is complex and is yet to be clarified.

In this talk, Dr Rie Asano will discuss the relationship between affect and social interaction by focusing on musical rhythm, which is an essential feature in every musical culture. She will first synthesise theoretical and empirical research and then suggest ways toward empirical study of affective components in rhythmic social interaction. She will also discuss the implications for research on the computational and phenomenological mind.

Speaker

Dr Rie Asano

Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Advanced Comprehensive Research Organization, Teikyo University

Dr Rie Asano’s current interests are syntax in language, music, and action, relationship between linguistic syntactic processing and musical rhythm, computational neurocognitive modelling, and computational evolutionary neuroscience. In addition, she started to conduct ALE meta-analyses of neuroimaging data.

Rie’s PhD project was on “Principled Explanations in Comparative Biomusicology – Toward a Comparative Cognitive Biology of the Human Cognitive Capacities for Music and Language”. In the thesis, she introduced a comparative framework investigating the relationship between language and music from cognitive science and biological perspectives. The main focus of the discussions was syntax in language and music as well as their neurocognitive mechanisms. After finishing up her Bachelor degree in Foreign Study and Linguistics at the Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, she completed the Magister (master) degree in Musicology, German Linguistics and Phonetics at the University of Cologne, Germany, where she also did her PhD research.