News from the Center
A new look!
In 2004, the Brain Sciences Center unveiled a new website designed to help raise public awareness of brain research. Today, our site has a new look! We hope you find it visually-pleasing and user-friendly. For the time being, you may still visit our old site at: http://www.brain.umn.edu/index_old.htm
2009 American Legion Family Brain Sciences Award
Brain Sciences graduate students Aurelio Alonso and Vasileios Christopoulos were awarded the 2009 American Legion Family Brain Sciences Award on Wednesday, September 11th during the 15th Annual American Legion and University of Minnesota Lecture in Brain Sciences. The lecture, "Circuits & circuit disorders of the basal ganglia: surgical repair", was was given by Mahlon DeLong, M.D., W.P. Timmie Professor of Neurology at Emory University School of Medicine. Photo (above) l-r: Jim Kellogg, president of the Brain Science Foundation; Lloyd Schaeffer and Bill Peters, Sons of the American Legion; and Dan Ludwig, past-National Commander, American Legion, award recipient Vasileios Christopoulos. More...
Conferences
BSC Researcher Roger Dumas recently returned from the 2009 Society for Music Perception & Cognition meeting in Indianapolis, where he presented a poster entitled "Neural processing of pitch as revealed by MEG". Along with fellow investigators Scott Lipscomb (School of Music, UofM), Art Leuthold and Apostolos Georgopoulos, Roger discovered subnetworks in the human brain that process musical pitches when they are presented randomly. The team is now investigating how these networks encode pitches in melodic sequences.
Publications
On September 3rd, PLOS Computational Biology accepted a paper by Vasileios Christopoulos and Paul Schrater (Psychology & Computer Science) entitled, "Grasping objects with environmentally induced position uncertainty" Summary:
On October 1st, the Journal of Mathematics and Music accepted a paper by Roger Dumas and Apostolos Georgopoulos entitled "What Prewhitened Music Can Tell Us About Multi-Instrument Compositions". Summary
We have discovered remarkable temporal associations between instruments in multi-instrument musical pieces after elimination of melody. Although it is commonly assumed that associations between instruments stem from the fact that these instruments play similar melodic parts, here we show that strong temporal associations do not depend on melody but exist in its absence. This indicates the presence of a compositional ‘structural’ framework among instruments based on dynamic, temporal interactions. We hypothesize that such a framework is at the heart of the process of musical composition. Since similar melodies can be arranged in different ways, resulting in unique compositions, the instrument framework above may be a fundamental aspect of the musical arrangement in the composer’s palette.
