Just came home from the 14th Rhythm Perception and Production Workshop, this time taking place at the University of Birmingham, UK. Like the last time in Leipzig there were lots of great talks and much food for thought. Some highlights, from my personal perspective:

• Bayesian perception of isochronous rhythms presented by Darren Rhodes and Massimiliano Di Luca. Interesting idea and nice to see a fellow Bayesian.
• Slowness in music performance and perception: An analysis of timing in Feldman’s “Last Pieces” presented by Dirk Moelants. Fun talk that dealt with how “slow” was interpred by performers of Feldman’s “Last Pieces”. Here is a not too slow rendition of some “Last Pieces” on youtube.
• Parameter estimation of sensorimotor synchronization models presented by Nori Jacoby, Peter Keller and Bruno Repp. Technical and interesting talk and I believe they have some papers out on this already.
• Two interesting talk on resonance models and EEG: Scrutinizing subjective rhythmization: A combined ERP/oscillatory approach by Christian Obermeier and Sonja A. Kotz, and From Sounds to Movement and Back: How Movement Shapes Neural Representation of Beat and Meter presented by Sylvie Nozaradan, Isabelle Peretz, André Mouraux

See the RPPW 14 program for the talk abstracts.

I also got great feedback on my presentation Hierarchical Bayesian Models for Analysis of Isochronous Sensorimotor Synchronization Data:

Here is the abstract and the presentation slides if anyone would be interested.

The RPPW 14 Skittles Tournament!

Turns out skittles is not only a kind of candy but also a bowling type game. Roughly half of the conference participated in a skittles tournament arranged by Alan Wing which was great fun! I took the liberty of delving deeper into the score data. The main results was perhaps the negative correlation between how well the teams scored and time (read beers):

Here are the full results and the data set.

At last, a seemingly grooving dog: