Research

A description of institutional affiliations

The Music in the Brain research group is located at Aarhus University, affiliated with Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), a cross-disciplinary brain research centre founded by the Danish National Research Foundation 2001-11. The centre is engaged with basic research – examining the human brain and how it responds and adjusts to diseases, and to the surrounding physical and social environment ‐ and in exploiting this knowledge in improved diagnosis and treatment of severe psychiatric and neurological disorders. With funding from several public and private funding bodies, CFIN facilities now includes most modern scanning technologies (PET, MR, MRI, fMRI, MEG, EEG and TMS), and extensive technical support. The MIB has grown to become an integrated, externally funded part of CFIN, and is now engaged in a range of interdisciplinary cooperations – securing knowledge transfer from other institutes, faculties and leading international groups. The MIB group is co-located with CFIN in the Danish Neuroscience Center, where it enjoys close interactions with clinicians and medical scientists and access to patients at Aarhus University Hospital’s Neurocenter.

The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg (RAMA), is responsible for the further education courses in music, and for contributing to promotion of musical culture in Denmark, under the auspices of the Danish Ministry of Culture. The teaching programs have been given the highest status, nationally and internationally, and measure up to the best comparable courses on offer abroad. RAMA trains students for careers as professional musicians, and students graduate as solo performers and as high level music teachers. Compared with other musical academies in Denmark to whom research is only a subordinate goal, RAMA is committed to performing first-rate music research at the international level. The main focus area in the research strategy of RAMA is “perception, cognition and learning”, in line with the research in the Music In the Brain group. The existing knowledge on all levels of musical artistic practice enables the academy to contribute substantially to the further development of research in musical cognition and learning.

Information about formalized international cooperation

The Music in the Brain group was formed by Peter Vuust in 2006 in collaboration with the CFIN (AU) and RAMA and has since been joined by Risto Näätänen. Supported almost entirely by non-CFIN funding, the MIB group currently consists of 2 senior scientists, 3 post. doc. and 7 Ph.D.-students, as well as number of co-supervised international Ph.D. students.

Being the first, and until now the only research group of its kind in Denmark, the MIB group has positioned itself nationally and internationally with active research collaborations with university departments and research institutions nationally and abroad including Cognitive Brain Research Unit (CBRU), Helsinki (Mikko Sams, Elvira Brattico and Mari Tervaniemi), Functional Imaging Laboratory (FIL), London (Chris Frith and Uta Frith), Institut für Musikphysiologie und Musikermedizin in Hannover (Eckart Altenmüller), Ohio State University (David Huron), University of Oxford (Morten Kringelbach and Eric Clarke), The Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, Imperial College, London (Henrik Jensen), Brunell University, London (Costas Karageorghis), Goldsmiths University of London (Lauren Stewart and Pam Heaton), Harvard Medical School (Gottfried Schlaug), University of Jyväskylä (Petri Toiviainen), University of Tartu (Risto Näätänen), Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon (UANL), Mexico (Eduardo Adrian Garza-Villarreal), the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig (Sonja Kotz).

These collaborations involve joint Ph.D.-supervision, organization of joint research training, international workshops and conferences, joint publications and participation in international grant applications.

 

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Publications

Activities

… such as peer reviewer; appearances in the mass media; participation in councils, boards, committees and networks; lectures and oral contributions.