Finally, we landed in Norway in Spring 2022! Our long-planned research stay at RITMO had been compromised by travel restrictions. With its team of talented researchers, students, and staff from around the world, RITMO was intellectually stimulating, leading to new research ideas and potential collaborations. We are grateful to all the RITMO members who contributed to make our stay in Oslo a very enjoyable one, invited us to many social events, and introduced us to the Norwegian life (for example, swimming in the Fjord in the winter!).
RITPART International Partnership
We would also like to thank the RITPART International Partnership network that funded our visit. RITPART is a partnership project that aims to connect RITMO to world-leading research groups in USA, Canada, and Japan. As members of McGill University, we were thankful to receive Short-Term Scientific Missions awards for a five-week visit. We participated in several team meetings and attended RITMO scientific events. Caroline Palmer gave a talk at the RITMO Seminar Series in which she presented her latest research about interpersonal synchrony in sound, brain, and body. Valentin Bégel presented his work on computational modelling of musical synchronization at the Interaction and Robotics theme meeting.
Pupillometry and eye-tracking in music performance
The beginning of our visit corresponded with a pupillometry workshop organized at RITMO.
Pupil dilation and constriction can display oscillatory patterns at periodicities present in a stimulus such as an auditory rhythm. They can also reflect bodily states such as arousal, fatigue, and higher-level cognition, including attention or executive functioning. Thereby, pupillometry offers a window into the cognitive and physiological processes that sustain the perception and production of auditory sequences. We designed and piloted new studies with RITMO members during our visit to investigate the pupil’s nonlinear dynamics involved in perception of and synchronization with auditory rhythms. We plan to add eye-tracking measures to studies in our McGill lab that address computational models of social interactions during music performance.
These studies will hopefully lead to long-term collaborations between our laboratory and RITMO.