Lecture Series: John Ashley Burgoyne

John Ashley Burgoyne co-teaches the University of Amsterdam’s introduction to cognitive and computational musicology. He conducts research at the Music Cognition Group of the Institute for Language, Logic, and Computation and the Research and Development division at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Before coming to Amsterdam in 2012, he received his doctorate from McGill University with a thesis entitled ‘Stochastic Processes and Database-Driven Musicology’. Trained in musicology and in statistical learning, he is especially interested in developing statistical models that are conceptually sound and musicologically interpretable as music research enters the digital humanities era.

How to Make It Stick: A Study of Long-Term Musical Memorability Using Citizen Science

Psycholinguist Steven Pinker once described music as being ‘auditory cheesecake’, similar to pornography and alcohol. Indeed, human beings do not seem to get enough of it. Music can be enchanting, annoying and intriguing. It helps us to concentrate or forget, it can make us jubilant or melancholic. Some songs, the so-called ‘earwigs’, can haunt us for days. These earwigs in particular are the subject of the upcoming talk. Our speaker will discuss what makes songs stick (i.e. what makes them ‘catchy’) by computationally analysing song structure and music recognition patterns by humans.