Michaelmas Term has been drawing to an end, and our Part II undergraduate students have been making excellent progress on their coursework research projects.
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Ellis Thomas has been studying the sense in which room acoustics affects expert performances of keyboard music.
Emily Trubshaw has been running a series of large-scale online experiments studying the link between tonality and emotion perception, with a particular focus on broadening the vocabulary used to describe musical emotions.
Fred Duffen has been studying the perceptual limits of listeners' sensitivity to hypermetre.
Hannah Wilkiehas been measuring impulse response functions for different Cambridge chapels and using them to create auralisations simulating musical performances in different acoustic spaces. She is currenlty putting together a behavioural experiment to examine people's sensitivity to different acoustic environments.
Lizzie Robbings has been studying the potential role of music as a concentration aid for people with ADHD.
Lottie Anstee has been conducting a systematic investigation into potential links between handedness and musical abilities, with a literature review component compiling results from previous literature, and a data analysis component working with the data from the multinational LongGold study of children's academic and musical development.
Megan Robinsonhas been developing an experimental paradigm to assess the memorability of different sonic logos in the context of music advertising. Once she collects behavioural data from this paradigm she will model how memorability can be predicted in terms of acoustic and musical features of these audio logos.
Silas Sanders has been studying interactions between the acoustic radiation patterns of the tuba and the physical configurations of performance spaces in the Faculty of Music. He has been working in particular with ODEON, the state-of-the-art industry software for modelling room acoustics.
We are grateful to our partners in academia and in industry who have been supporting these projects by providing useful advice and/or resources, in particular Dan Tidhar at the University of Cambridge (supporting Ellis's project), Camilla Fletcher and Raf Orlowski at Ramboll (supporting Ellis's, Hannah's, and Silas's projects), Nori Jacoby at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (supporting Emily's project), Daniel Müllensiefen and the LongGold project (supporting Lottie's project), and David Baker, Daniel Müllensiefen, and SoundOut (supporting Megan's project).