Entrainment in music research, The Open University

Entrainment in music research

An international collaborative network

This three-year collaborative project (initially funded from April 2004 – March 2007) entails the study of entrainment within a musicological context. Entrainment - roughly speaking, the synchronisation of autonomous rhythmic processes - is a well-established concept in disciplines from mathematics to neuroscience and social psychology, but has only recently begun to be applied in music research, where it has great potential. Through interdisciplinary collaboration we hope to make advances in the development of research methodologies, and contribute to the greater understanding of this important phenomenon. The network's programme is funded by a grant from the British Academy to this end.

The leaders of the project are Professor Martin Clayton (Open University, UK), Professor Udo Will (Ohio State University, USA), and Dr Ian Cross (University of Cambridge, UK). Professor Clayton has a well-established international reputation for his ethnomusicological research on Indian music, including his major publication Time in Indian Music (OUP 2000). Professor Udo Will is Professor of Cognitive Ethnomusicology at OSU: being one of very few scholars worldwide with competence in both ethnomusicology and neuroscience, he is well placed to play a key role in the development of theory and method in this area. Dr Ian Cross is Reader in Music & Science at the University of Cambridge and has been conducting experimental research in music cognition for over twenty years; his current research involves the exploration of music from evolutionary perspectives with particular focus on temporal interaction.

The scheme of research involves the project leaders, together with their research students working in this area, and a small group of professional colleagues, sharing knowledge and ideas and coordinating the development of methods for investigating entrainment. The emphasis is on the synthesis of current thinking in cognitive psychology and neurosciences with consideration of real-life musical behaviours in their social and cultural contexts.

For more information contact Professor Martin Clayton