A Decade of Music and Science
A few days ago Amy Belfi pointed out it’s been ten years since we met.
This is an important date because the weekend we met felt like it was my unofficial start to joining the music and science community.
For context, that weekend David Huron’s lab at The Ohio State University was hosting a joint workshop and conference.
I was living in Cleveland at the time and can’t remember for the life of me how I knew this event was happening. It may have been after a few correspondences with David Huron (a post for another time, the man who over a 90 minute phone call earlier that year plotted out a career trajectory for me that I mostly adhered to), but regardless, I remember at that point in my life I was planning to attend the Goldsmiths, Music, Mind and Brain programme the coming autumn.
I vividly remember getting on the I-71 ramp towards Columbus because that was the week that Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories was released. At the time I had burned a copy of it to a CD and resolved to rinse it at full volume the entire drive. From the opening fanfare, to the ascension at the end, the entire album feels permanently etched in my brain from that drive.
I didn’t know anyone in the room when I walked in and I’m pretty sure that was the first day I ever heard the word corpora said out loud. After day one of the conference, I have a crystal clear memory of sitting at the bar pictured below with Amy, drinking PBRs and instantly feeling like I have found the right people.
I have high quality picture of this place because when I returned to Columbus in May of 2019 to visit my PhD advisor (the post doc who ended up organizing that conference in 2013, though I don’t think we interacted that weekend) I walked past this place and thought to myself, that’s basically where this all started. I should take a picture.
I completely agree with Amy’s sentiment about this community. That week and every interaction I have had with music and science people is also the reason I always try to help out anyone interested in learning more about this community when they are also interested in how they can get involved.
This is a picture of myself, Amy, and Brian Miller. Brian was a Masters student at the time (the first version of this post said he was already at Yale) and went on to write a really fantastic dissertation on Leonard Meyer and has written several very great articles as a result of that work.
If anyone has a link to the conference program that weekend, I would love to see a copy of it. I know there several other people I met that weekend have since become colleagues or friends in some capacity.
Updates
2023-05-22Dan Shanahan of course had a pdf of the original program.