BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Memento EPFL//
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:The social power of music? A computational and experimental odysse
 y
DTSTART:20150612T110000
DTSTAMP:20260916T013447Z
UID:0861ac55a9e98ee781652c95f51e6c08d0803f1ae59c0686797ce778
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Jean-Julien Aucouturier\nCNRS Researcher (Cognitive Science)\n
 IRCAM (Paris\, France)\n« Music has all the attributes of a communicative
  system that is highly adapted to facilitate the management of the uncerta
 inties of social interaction » (Ian Cross\, The Evolutionary Nature of Mu
 sical Meaning\, p. 190)\nThe human faculties for communicating acousticall
 y with words and music rely on cognitive mechanisms that are strikingly si
 milar\, and which a long series of alternating theoretical and empirical a
 rguments have suggested were selected either for language (e.g.\, JJ Rouss
 eau\, Essai sur l'Origine des Langues)\, music (e.g.\, Wallin\, Merker & B
 rown\, 2001) or a common antecedent of both (e.g.\, Darwin\, The Descent o
 f Man).\nOne of the most-enduring proposals for selective pressures that m
 ay have shaped our cognition specifically for music is a pre-linguistic ro
 le it may have held for social cohesion\, traces of which may be still man
 ifest today in music’s ability to mediate social attitudes such as coope
 rativeness and trust (e.g.\, Kirschner & Tomasello\, 2010).\nHowever\, one
  still does not know on what cognitive capacity these effects rely\, wheth
 er this capacity is functionally distinct from that utilized to communicat
 e similar attitudes linguistically\, and whether it was indeed selected sp
 ecifically for music.\nIn this talk\, we show that spontaneous dyadic musi
 cal interactions can not only mediate\, but directly communicate complex p
 ositive and negative social intents such as conciliation\, disdain or inso
 lence. Using computational and psychoacoustical analyses\, we show that su
 ch communication relies for a significant part on extra-linguistic cues li
 nked to temporal and harmonic coordination. However\, striking differences
  between musicians and non-musicians show that the capacity to process suc
 h cues is not strongly innately constrained\, suggesting it wasn’t a spe
 cific adaptation for music.\nWhile casting doubts on social cohesion scena
 rios for the origins of music\, these results nevertheless establish that 
 more diverse and complex social behavior is possible with music than previ
 ously believed\, opening new avenues for diagnosis and remediation of soci
 al processing disorders such as the ones found on the autism spectrum.
LOCATION:SG 0213 http://plan.epfl.ch/?zoom=19&recenter_y=5864254.42842&rec
 enter_x=730736.47287&layerNodes=fonds\,batiments\,labels\,information\,par
 kings_publics\,arrets_metro\,transports_publics&floor=0&q=SG_0213
STATUS:CONFIRMED
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR