Happy new year! This has been a truly exciting semester, since our application to the Research Council of Finland for the project "Musical Sharing In Copresent Time And Space" (MUSICOTAS) has been successfully funded!

MUSICOTAS sets out to explore the multifaceted dynamics of musical engagement by:

• Gaining deeper insights into music-making and consumption across various formats through participatory research
• Investigating how different performance and listening contexts affect movement, cardiac activity, rhythmic-social synchrony, affective states, and enjoyment for both musicians and audiences
• Developing new methods for data processing, music description, synchrony assessment, and multimodal corporeal analysis

This interdisciplinary consortium project will be carried out by researchers from Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain at the University of Jyväskylä and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

We look forward to advancing the science of musical experience and sharing more as the project unfolds!

I'm beyond thrilled to announce that, starting today, I'm an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Assistant Professor (tenure track) at the Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain (Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä)! I am over the moon, so grateful for this next step in my career, and so excited about the work to come. These are truly exciting times!

This week we are isolating at home after testing positive for COVID-19. Sounds like the perfect scenario for some updates:

• My work is currently supported by the Take the "N" Train project. This means that I am conducting awesome research on rhythmic and social entrainment. We have some interesting publications on the topic already and there's more coming soon.
• We are (once again) an Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence! Our Music, Mind, Body and Brain consortium (with University of Helsinki; main PI: Petri Toiviainen) has turned 5 months recently. We have done plenty of progress with our modules and with the development of the super exciting MMBB-MB Battery.
• We are MUSICCONNECT! Our new European Research Council Consolidator Grant (PI: Suvi Saarikallio) will allow us to study engagement with music as a socioemotional resource for the European youth. This project has not yet started, but we are already working on a fantastic motion capture study.

These are truly exciting times and there are lots of other interesting things that could be mentioned, but I just wanted to give some crucial updates here. Always proud to be part of the Musica team!

PS: I had my first encounter with the Northern Lights! They are absolutely mesmerizing.

In the end of 2019 I had the pleasure to visit Bern, the city of bears. It was quite tough to say bye to the kids, and especially to Matilda, who was just three months old. The purpose of the visit to the "federal city" of Switzerland was to establish a collaboration with Fabian Ramseyer, who helped me with my work on kinematics of interaction in music therapy (let's hope that I can also help him with some of his work, too). This visit was crucial for my Interaction in Music Therapy for Depression project, as I had the chance to try out some tools for estimation of pseudosynchrony that can allow for calculating the effect size of the observed synchronization. Really looking forward to return to Switzerland after this pandemic to meet Fabian again, to present, and to discuss some results.

[[][Bern]

These years have been quite busy. Of course, I was expecting to write something here more often, and of course, that wasn't the case. Perhaps the current pandemic helps me to try to be a little bit more active with this blog. So what has been going on in pseudochronological order? In the end of 2018, right after starting my very own Interaction in Music Therapy for Depression project, I had the chance to travel to Sydney to visit Prof. Michael Richardson (Department of Psychology, Macquarie University). Mike was a truly amazing host. Among many other things, he teached me how to use OpenPose and I also had the chance to use some of his excellent Matlab functions. I absolutely loved everything about that experience and about Sydney. I also presented at the Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology 2018 meeting. I had lots of fun and interesting discussions with gibsonian philosophers and had the chance to attend some great keynotes (e.g. Andy Clark). And I couldn't leave Sydney without enjoying a day with the Music Cognition and Action group (The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development). I was kindly offered to give a presentation, Manuel Varlet showcased the lab, and I had the change to briefly meet many researchers and students. Overall, a truly awesome experience.

Okay, next time I guess it will be time to talk a bit about 2019…

Great news at work and at home! The Academy of Finland has decided to fund my three-year project Interaction in Music Therapy for Depression, which aims to predict both severity of depression and therapeutic outcome directly from temporal interaction patterns between client and therapist. I will start with this project in September at the Faculty of Information Technology (University of Jyväskylä).

Although my university has licensed most of the Mathworks toolboxes, only a few licenses have been issued for some of them. This means that I often need to wait in order to be able to use them. And it is impossible to know when will they be available. So I created a function that sends me an e-mail whenever there are free licenses for a given toolbox. The function is called checklicense; it is hosted in Github and can be downloaded from the MATLAB File Exchange.

Now to receive an e-mail whenever the Image Processing Toolbox is available, the following command can be used in MATLAB:

checklicense('Image_Toolbox', 'myemail@gmail.com')

I have added a Tutorial on Musical Genre Classification and a Tutorial on Musical Segmentation with MIDI toolbox to the Resources menu. Matlab with MIRToolbox and Weka are used in the the Musical Genre Classification tutorial, and Matlab with MIDI toolbox is used in the Musical Segmentation tutorial. It was a pleasure for me to prepare them as teaching material. Feel free to reuse this material as you wish, but maintain the references to assure the original authors receive appropriate credit.

Once again I will try to write periodically in a blog. Now that I know how to add a blog to this website, it is a good occasion to remember my short but intense visit to Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) in November 2013. I mean, after visiting a School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science you should at least be able to write a blog post in a computer, right? I was invited to give a talk at the Internal Seminar of the Centre for Digital Music. It was called Modelling 'perceptual' and 'cognitive' segmentation of music (thanks Elaine Chew for advertising it in your blog). I had just finished with my data collection, so I was very happy to discuss about how to analyze it and start with some basic analysis. I met amazing young and senior researchers during my time there, and I got great feedback regarding my project. It would be a pleasure to visit them again at some point.