The 17th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus24)

Abstract

The 17th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus24) was hosted by the Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body, and Brain (CoE MMBB) at the Department of Music, Art, and Culture Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, from June 8 to 10, 2024. Organized in hybrid format, the conference offered a rich variety of presentations and activities featuring 41 talks, 10 posters, 5 workshops, and a panel discussion, as well as an entertaining program of social events. Keynote talks were given by Minna Huotilainen (Professor of Educational Sciences, Director of the Changing Education master's program and Principal Investigator at the Centre of Excellence in Research on Music, Mind, Body, and Brain at the University of Helsinki, Finland), Tuomas Eerola (Professor in Music Cognition and Director of Research at Durham University, UK) and Isabelle Peretz (Professor of Psychology at the University of Montreal, Canada). This conference report offers an overview of SysMus24, reviewing the topics addressed across the conference, and reflecting on the value and timeliness of the hybrid format and its place within the future of academic conferences.

About SysMus

Founded by Richard Parncutt and Manuela Marin in 2008, the International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus) takes place annually and is organized for and by students and early-career researchers working within the broad field of systematic musicology. Systematic musicology has been defined by Leman and Schneider (1997) as “an interdisciplinary science, whose aim is to explore the foundations of music from different points of view, such as acoustics, physiology, psychology, anthropology, music theory, sociology, and aesthetics” (p.13). As distinct from historical musicology, which is broadly concerned with describing and cataloguing musical practices (Kohler & Bamford, 2016), systematic musicology asks, “what is music, what is it for, and why do we engage with it?” (Parncutt, 2007, p. 3).

As well as being an ideal initiation into the world of academic conferences, SysMus provides a valuable opportunity for students and early-career researchers to gain first-hand experience in organizing an international event. For all delegates it is a chance to meet and share ideas with researchers working in diverse disciplines within the field of music science. Many SysMus graduates are now established researchers working within systematic musicology and related disciplines. Today's newcomers are likely to be found guiding future SysMus attendees just as many seasoned delegates have supported this year's first-time participants and organizers. Since 2020, when the 13th conference took place entirely online owing to the COVID-19 pandemic (Peck, 2020), SysMus has been organized in a hybrid format, making participation accessible to researchers from across the world.

SysMus24

The 17th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus24) was hosted by the Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain (CoE MMBB) at the Department of Music, Art, and Culture Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, from June 8 to 10, 2024. The conference featured 41 talks (13 of which were presented online), 10 posters, five workshops, and a panel discussion. The organizing committee was led by Nandhini Natarajan, supervised by Joshua Silberstein-Bamford, coordinated by Markku Pöyhönen, and supported by Professor Petri Toiviainen. This year's event followed a very successful 16th SysMus conference held at the University of Sheffield, UK, in June 2023.

SysMus24 drew delegates from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australasia. Online participation was available via the platform Gather Town, and travel grants were provided by the organizing committee of Sysmus16 (University of Sheffield, UK). The conference was additionally supported by The Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body, and Brain (CoE MMBB); University of Jyväskylä, CliniLab Oy; the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM); the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies; the FORTHEM Alliance; and the Society of Education, Music, and Psychology Research (SEMPRE).

The University of Jyväskylä has a strong tradition of research in music from interdisciplinary perspectives. Researchers at the CoE MMBB use a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to study how and why people make music throughout their lives, conducting research on almost every topic in music science, including music psychology, therapy, movement, and neuroscience. The Musica building, home to this year's SysMus conference as well as the CoE MMBB and a part of the Department of Music, Art, and Culture Studies, might appear small at first glance; however, this impressive facility is internally spacious, featuring a large lecture theatre, extensive teaching spaces, and specialist research facilities, including a studio space, music therapy rooms, and the Motion Capture (MoCap) Lab, providing a rich and dynamic research environment.

Jyväskylä is known as a university city and for its stunning lakes and scenery. The near 24 hours of daylight at this time of the year and some beautiful weather made the conference experience particularly special. In addition, the CoE MMBB team offered a warm welcome to SysMus24 delegates and three inspiring days of talks, posters, workshops, discussions, and social events. It was a privilege to see many of the CoE MMBB's projects in action and to experience some aspects of research at first hand in the workshops. Presentations and keynotes provided insights into the latest research in our field, while scheduled downtime and an engaging social program offered opportunities to make connections, discuss the topics presented, and enjoy the company of like-minded colleagues. Opportunities to play and hear live music were especially appreciated by delegates.

Keynotes

The first keynote was given by Minna Huotilainen (Professor of Educational Sciences, Director of the Changing Education master's program, and Principal Investigator at the Centre of Excellence in Research on Music, Mind, Body, and Brain at the University of Helsinki). In the course of her work on music and learning from pre-birth to adolescence, Professor Huotilainen has explored fetal musical learning, demonstrating the neural benefits of musical play in school and instrumental lessons.

In her talk entitled “Music is a Mystery to Neuroscience” Professor Huotilainen examined the interconnection of neuroscience and music research, reviewing the past, present, and potential of the neuroscientific approach to music and the brain and discussing some of the challenges involved in studying aspects of the field that are as yet little understood. She emphasized the importance of being able to communicate research findings to the general public in an understandable format by connecting findings to their potential applications in everyday life.

The second keynote talk, “Music and Science – The State of the Field: Transparency, Diversity, & Equality,” was given by Tuomas Eerola (Professor in Music Cognition and Director of Research at Durham University, UK), whose research combines empirical music research, music psychology, and music and science, with particular focus on music and emotions and the perception of central elements of music such as melody, timbre, rhythm, meter, and dissonance.

The keynote offered an examination of research practices in music psychology in comparison with other disciplines within the social sciences. A champion of open science, Professor Eerola reported on a recent study (Eerola, 2024) exploring a random sample of over two hundred articles published by specialist music psychology journals between 2017 and 2022 to identify pre-registrations, open access, data availability, and funding and conflict-of-interest statements. The study revealed a broadly encouraging degree of open access and funding acknowledgment within music psychology; however, the sharing of research data and materials is rare, with data made available in only 5% of the published articles. These results lend support to the concern expressed by Hardwicke et al. (2022) and Frieler et al. (2013) regarding the lack of transparency in the fields of psychology and music psychology.

In terms of diversity, music psychology was found to be overwhelmingly WEIRD, i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (Henrich et al., 2010), with the vast majority of studies produced in and involving participants from WEIRD countries (the most productive being Finland, Australia, Estonia, Norway, and the UK). Professor Eerola noted that, despite the excellent work taking place in these countries, such lack of diversity has implications for our potential understanding of concepts, processes, phenomena and values beyond WEIRD cultures. He argued for a shift in focus from WEIRD to WILD, or Worldwide, In situ, Local, and Diverse research (Newson et al., 2021). The WILD approach goes beyond arguing for greater representation of non-WEIRD participants in the pursuit of understanding about human behavior, underscoring the significance of diverse contextual and environmental influences on responses within any participant sample. It urges mindfulness of demographic and situational factors in constructing methodologies, as well as in interpreting research data.

From the perspective of gender equality, results were more encouraging, with female first authors representing 55% of the music psychology sample, as compared with just under 50% in psychology and only 14.5% in the so-called “hard” sciences. This highly engaging and inspiring talk offered an important perspective, not only for researchers learning about and working within the social sciences but for those involved in experimental research within any discipline.

The third keynote was given by Isabelle Peretz (Professor of Psychology at the University of Montreal) and entitled “Singing in the brain.” Although the benefits of singing are widely known and reported worldwide, research on singing is relatively recent. Professor Peretz emphasized that singing is spontaneous, universal, and a part of human nature. Singing is also special (considered distinct from speech, using specific brain networks), social (song structure favors group singing, and simultaneous coordinated vocalization between people can enhance social bonding), and healthy (effective for reducing stress and pain, improving cardiorespiratory functions, and increasing oxytocin – the “happy” hormone associated with trust and relationship building (Dunbar et al., 2012)). Adults ubiquitously report that they enjoy singing, and many indulge in spontaneous improvisatory singing in the absence of other people (Weiss & Peretz, 2022). This final keynote of the conference offered insights into some of the most important recent research exploring our “most universal means of music-making” (Peretz, 2024).

Presentations

The talks presented on-site in Jyväskylä were arranged into themes: Wellbeing, Diversity, Data Processing, Emotion, Music and Movement, Therapy and Health, Musicking, Music and Neuroscience, Scoping Reviews, and Popular Culture. Additional online presentations were arranged into four sessions to accommodate presenters in different time zones. For the most part, two parallel sessions ran at a time.

On Saturday June 8, the first session, Wellbeing, included talks on the role of attachment style in music mood regulation (presented by Julia Vigl), the effect of music activity in maintaining wellbeing with a cross-cultural perspective (presented by Hongjuan Zhu), and the new Episode Model of Emotional Experience (presented by Connor Kirts).

In Diversity, Lou Barnell explored neurodiversity in the context of creative music making and performance, while Anni Kiikola discussed Finnish songwriters’ conceptions about gendered musical expression in Western pop music. Flora Henderson shared her work on music notation dyslexia, drawing attention to the impact of cultural and neuroscientific influences on research and findings.

A parallel session addressed Data Processing, including presentations on dual processing streams in musical timbre perception by Oliver Tab Bellmann, video and music perception in virtual reality by Egil Ovesen, and performance data analysis for community music experiments by Matthias Jung.

On Sunday June 9, the session on Emotion featured three talks, each focusing on music-listening experiences from the perspective of different youth populations, from young children (5–11-year-olds) in the UK (Caroline Owen), to adolescents (11–18-year-olds) in Latvia (Tatjana Voitova), and young adults (15–25-year-olds) in Finland (Lotta Kourilehto).

Music and Movement featured work on electronic dance music (EDM) (James Cannon), groove and empathy (Riya Sidhu), and empirical evaluation of the feeling of “being moved” by music (Abbigail Fleckenstein). In parallel, Therapy and Health featured research into the emotional and neurological effects of musical improvisation (Nandhini Natarajan), a case study of music therapy in an individual with a fear of falling (Jaana Ruotsalainen), and music-based health communication (Hannele Partanen).

In the afternoon, online presentations addressed mental imagery (Ceren Ayyıldız), the perception of tonal and temporal features in Eastern music (Poulami Kar), memorization training for pianists learning post-tonal music (Laura Farré Rozada), the development of a stimulus set of happy and sad Bollywood soundtracks for emotion research (Bhavya Dixit), the influence of cultural familiarity and individual differences on emotion perception in Chinese and Western musical stimuli (Menglan Lyu), and cross-cultural communication of emotion in music (Yue You).

On Monday June 10, Musicking featured a qualitative exploration of participants’ social perceptions during experiments involving musical interactions with virtual partners, presented by Persefoni Tzanaki, and a review of the application of voluntary musical imagery in music practice, presented by Chen Meng. Meanwhile, Music and Neuroscience featured work on brain responses to music and speech (Victoria Norris) and a novel methodological approach using the electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure content and timing predictions in music and speech (Luiza Lucuța).

Scoping Reviews of music education, music for wellbeing, and music-evoked fear were presented by Alicia Lucendo-Noriega, Heini Siltainsuu, and Katariina Henttonen respectively, while presentations on Popular Culture included contextualizing ideological discourse in film music (Saana Sutinen), music for sleep (Rebecca Scarratt), and the capacity of horror music for inducing anxiety in a video game (Santeri Salmirinne and Enja Heikkilä).

Talks presented online featured a variety of topics, from the impact of synchrony, music, and touch on children's prosocial behavior (Gabriella Vizzutti); rhythmic regularity in speech-to-song transformation (Lalit Mohan); the impact of cultural familiarity, musical expertise, and short-term learning on the perception of rhythmic patterns in North Indian Classical music (Nashra Ahmad); microtonal composition (Edward Clijsen); “Interpretative Organ-isms” (Katelyn Emerson); and picking techniques on a nylon guitar (Augusto Cesar Pereira Armondes); to visual cues and topics in the music of Squid Game (Eunah Lee).

Posters

Posters were presented online in the form of flash talks, following previous SysMus formats (Ayyıldız et al., 2023). A wide range of research topics included music emotion recognition (Menglan Lyu); bells and bell-ringing in the music of Rachmaninov (Martina Kamenska); flautists’ performance-related health and wellbeing (Jiayi Wang); event cognition in contemporary music (Khashayar Shahriyari); individual differences in the use of music for mood regulation (Catherine Tan); singing, health and wellbeing (Bruna Francisco Martins); the impact of musical training on the effect of synchrony on social bonding (Gabriela Sarmiento); the development of singing skills in schoolchildren (Reinis Mauritis); the relationship between Taylor Swift's lyrics and audio features (Luiza Lucuța); and musical activities to support parent–child bonding (Sara Lindstedt).

Workshops

The conference offered a choice of five workshops, including an introduction to the Finnish early music education concept Muskari and music therapy, motion capture, experience sampling, peer reviewing, and publishing.

Marc Thompson, senior researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, introduced the Motion Capture Lab and equipment hosted at the department and software utilized to analyze three-dimensional movement. Will Randall, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, presented a workshop about experience sampling using the MuPsych app, developed during his PhD study at Monash University (Australia). MuPsych allows for real-time measurement of changes in emotional state during everyday music listening. The app is being updated in 2024 with a view to making it more user-friendly and attractive. These workshops provided a window into the research taking place and the facilities and technologies utilized at the CoE MMBB.

Workshops on Getting Published by Niels Christian Hansen and Peer Reviewing by Jan Stupacher centered on aspects of professional life, highlighting some of the practical skills involved in producing and sharing research findings. These two workshops facilitated conversations about professional life as a researcher working in the field of music science. Delegates considered this a valuable addition to an early career conference to complement learning about specific research topics within the field.

Panel Discussion

The panel discussion, facilitated by Heini Siltainsuu, concerned mental health and the PhD. The panel comprised Connor Kirts (a PhD researcher at the University of Durham, UK), Deniz Duman (a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä), and Jaana M Ruotsalainen, (a practicing physiotherapist and PhD researcher at the University of Jyväskylä). The panel and audience members, which included senior scholars and supervisors, discussed various experiences and challenges, and shared resources and practical advice regarding mental wellbeing within the context of doctoral study. Among other issues, the significant workload, absence of fixed working hours leading to little real time off work, and financial insecurity were recognized as challenges by many delegates. Peer support, help with funding, and support in creating sustainable work routines and work–life balance were recognized as important for maintaining health and wellbeing. It was concluded that ongoing discussion is important for developing both formal and informal support systems for students at all stages of their PhD, and that the opportunity for dialogue is valuable for students, supervisors, and researchers of all levels of experience.

An Entertaining Social Program

At the end of the first day, delegates were treated to a conference dinner cruise with picturesque views around the beautiful lakes surrounding Jyväskylä. The bright sunshine late into the evening offered a perfect Nordic midsummer experience and together with the warm atmosphere and excellent fare made this a special first night of the SysMus 2024 conference.

On the second day, social activities included a workshop by the performing ensemble Sisi Majitu, a silent disco in the MoCap lab where delegates could take part in a motion-capture experiment, and a self-guided tour of the Soihtu Museum. The live music and musical activities were welcome additions to the academic environment. Further entertainment included “Conference Bingo” and opportunities to sample the night life of Jyväskylä in virtual daylight.

In addition to the rich social program, an excellent range of catering and refreshments was available throughout the conference, and frequent breaks between sessions kept the days well paced and participants energized.

Closing Remarks

SysMus24 provided another invaluable opportunity for students and early-career researchers to come together to share knowledge, make new contacts, and set in motion the wheels of new collaborative ideas and projects, as well as to socialize and forge new friendships. While participants in Jyväskylä were taken great care of by our wonderful hosts, the hybrid format enabled delegates from across the world to be a part of the process. It has been announced that SysMus25, the 18th Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology, will be hosted by RITMO, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion, at the University of Oslo.

The hybrid format can present challenges, given the need to accommodate presenters in different time zones and the potential for technical issues. In this year's SysMus conference, any difficulties were swiftly and successfully addressed by the organizers. The authors have reflected that the extent to which we should move aspects of our work online, versus how much importance we place on face-to-face encounters, has become one of the questions of our time within academia. With its now usual hybrid format, SysMus is participating in this discourse and playing a role in the formation of the post-pandemic academic world. This is particularly salient given that SysMus is organized by students and early-career researchers who are arguably the future of academia and, as such, an important voice in the future of conference organization. As noted by Ayyildic et al. (2023), the global accessibility of online participation can be particularly important for students and recent graduates whose universities may not cover travel and accommodation costs. Furthermore, reducing worldwide travel makes conferences more environmentally friendly, and so the question of online–offline hybridity is timely. Nevertheless, conversations with fellow SysMus delegates suggest that face-to-face interaction plays a distinct role in forming interpersonal connections – an experience that is difficult to reproduce online. The addition of social events for online participants contributed significantly to their feeling of involvement – certainly something to bear in mind for future conferences. Such ongoing meta-discussion regarding the roles and functions of on- and offline participation is needed in modern academic environments.

We congratulate all the organizers on the success of SysMus24. Thank you to all the reviewers and volunteers who worked on the conference, to all our sponsors, and to Dr Manuela Marin and everyone on the SysMus Council for their ongoing support of the SysMus conference series.

We especially thank Nandhini Natarajan, the SysMus24 organizing committee, and their supervisor Dr Joshua Silberstein-Bamford, and everyone at the University of Jyväskylä's Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body, and Brain, for making this year's SysMus conference an exciting and inspirational experience.