Music is experienced, performed and shared by people in all societies, ages and social groups. Recently, neuroscientific interest in music has increased dramatically as modern brain imaging techniques have provided researchers the means to investigate the living human brain at work.
The Center for Music in the Brain (MIB) was formed by Peter Vuust in 2006 in collaboration with Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), Aarhus University Hospital and Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg (RAMA). Supported almost entirely by non-CFIN funding, the MIB group currently consists of 2 senior scientists, 3 post. doc. and 7 Ph.D.-students, as well as number of co-supervised international Ph.D. students. MIB aims to facilitate contacts between different scientific approaches to studying music and the brain, and to introduce this scientific field to a broader audience within the Danish music community.
Being the first, and until now the only research group of its kind in Northern Europe, the MIB group has positioned itself nationally and internationally with active research collaborations with university departments and research institutions nationally and abroad including Cognitive Brain Research Unit (CBRU), Helsinki (Elvira Brattico and Mari Tervaniemi), Functional Imaging Laboratory (FIL), London (Chris Frith and Uta Frith), Institut für Musikphysiologie und Musikermedizin in Hannover (Eckart Altenmüller), Ohio State University (David Huron), University of Oxford (Morten Kringelbach and Eric Clarke), The Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, Northwestern University (Nina Kraus), Harvard Graduate School of Education, US (Jenny Thomson), Imperial College, London (Henrik Jensen), Brunell University, London (Costas Karageorghis), Goldsmiths University of London (Lauren Stewart and Pam Heaton), Harvard Medical School (Gottfried Schlaug). These collaborations involve joint Ph.D.-supervision, organization of joint research training, international workshops and conferences, joint publications and participation in international grant applications.
A description of institutional affiliations
The Music in the Brain research group is located at Aarhus University, affiliated with Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), a cross-disciplinary brain research centre founded by the Danish National Research Foundation 2001-11. The centre is engaged with basic research – examining the human brain and how it responds and adjusts to diseases, and to the surrounding physical and social environment ‐ and in exploiting this knowledge in improved diagnosis and treatment of severe psychiatric and neurological disorders. With funding from several public and private funding bodies, CFIN facilities now includes most modern scanning technologies (PET, MR, MRI, fMRI, MEG, EEG and TMS), and extensive technical support. The MIB has grown to become an integrated, externally funded part of CFIN, and is now engaged in a range of interdisciplinary cooperations – securing knowledge transfer from other institutes, faculties and leading international groups. The MIB group is co-located with CFIN in the Danish Neuroscience Center, where it enjoys close interactions with clinicians and medical scientists and access to patients at Aarhus University Hospital’s Neurocenter.
The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg (RAMA), is responsible for the further education courses in music, and for contributing to promotion of musical culture in Denmark, under the auspices of the Danish Ministry of Culture. The teaching programs have been given the highest status, nationally and internationally, and measure up to the best comparable courses on offer abroad. RAMA trains students for careers as professional musicians, and students graduate as solo performers and as high level music teachers. Compared with other musical academies in Denmark to whom research is only a subordinate goal, RAMA is committed to performing first-rate music research at the international level. The main focus area in the research strategy of RAMA is “perception, cognition and learning”, in line with the research in the Music In the Brain group. The existing knowledge on all levels of musical artistic practice enables the academy to contribute substantially to the further development of research in musical cognition and learning.
ACTIVITIES
The activities of the network include weekly seminars and a biannual meeting at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, where international researchers as well as prominent people from the music community are invited to speak.
Weekly MIB Seminars
The weekly seminars take place on Thursdays from 11-2 AM 2 the DNC building’s 4th floor meeting room. The seminars are open and free for anyone who are interested in research, music and neuroscience. Selected seminars can be followed online. Follow this link to get information about upcoming seminars.
Biannual meetings
The first meeting entitled “Experience and Learning” took place april 2006 with the participation of international top researchers including Isabelle Peretz, Mireille Besson, Eckhard Altenmueller and Gottfried Schlaug.
The second meeting entitled “From Music to Experiment: A Practical Workshop in Empirical Music Research” took place August 20th – 22nd 2009 with the participation of international top researchers including David Huron, Lauren Stewart, Peter Vuust and Pam Heaton. This meeting was arranged by The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus, Denmark & The Academy of Music, Aalborg, Denmark.
Peter Vuust, Professor, PhD, coordinator of Music in the Brain
Founding institutions:
Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg
Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN)
Department of Psychology, University of Aarhus
Department of Music, University of Aarhus
