Monte Verità Workshop 2023

I was fortunate to spend this last week at Monte Verità in Switzerland, attending a workshop on decoding musical structure. Over the course of three and a half days, we had the unique opportunity to talk in an open, unstructured way about how to best bridge links between research in music theory, psychology, computation, and neuroscience.

Unlike attending a conference, the week was not structured with pre-prepared formal talks, but rather a series of impulse talks on several of the high level topics such as…

• What is the relationship between music theory, computation and cognition?
• Ecological/naturalistic/musicological listening
• Research methods – Addressing methodological and knowledge gaps/incompatibilities between the three fields
• Computational and cognitive representations
• Music cognition in 20 years; training the next generation of researchers

Though we were encouraged not to prepare any sort of elaborate talks, I wrote out two of my short impulse talks I planned to give and will just post sketches of them after this post to give a small flavor of what we were talking about.

I very much enjoyed the workshop’s lack of directed structure and top-down direction, which allowed the discussion to cover a lot of ground. In practice, this meant there was a lot of very ambitious, big thinking. In due time there will be some more academic output as a result from all these discussions, but that will have to wait.