Developing a subjective ‘matching pairs game’ for large-scale phenotyping of musicality

Developing a subjective ‘matching pairs game’ for large-scale phenotyping of musicality

This project is part of a series of pilot studies that will contribute to an international and interdisciplinary research agenda on musicality (Honing, 2018). The main aim is to develop engaging listening games (Aljanaki et al., 2014; Burgoyne, Bountouridis, Balen, & Honing, 2013) that allow for, in potential, the hundreds of thousands of responses that are needed to be able to properly characterize musicality phenotypes, and their variability, in a variety of geographical regions with ready access to the internet.

The main task is to explore and evaluate candidate games for probing melody and rhythm cognition, games that are effective in probing the underlying phenotype, its variability, as well as being intrinsically motivating. An example is the Matching Pairs game, where two melodies have to be judged as being the same in a context of several alternatives. For this, a subjective and adaptive variant needs to be developed (Khenissi et al., 2014), as well as proper statistical methods to analyse the results. The project will lead to a literature thesis or Master thesis.

Requirements:

– Expertise in Computational musicology, AI and/or Psychonomics

– Programming skills in relevant toolkits and software (such as R)

– Interest in music cognition

References:

– Aljanaki, A., Bountouridis, D., Burgoyne, J. A., van Balen, J., Wiering, F., Honing, H., & Veltkamp, R. (2014). Designing games with a purpose for data collection in music research. Emotify and Hooked: Two case studies. In Games and Learning Alliance (pp. 29–40). Springer International Publishing.

– Burgoyne, J. A., Bountouridis, D., Balen, J. van, & Honing, H. (2013). Hooked: A Game For Discovering What Makes Music Catchy. In A. De Souza Britto, F. Gouyon, & S. Dixon (Eds.), ISMIR (pp. 245–250). Curitiba, Brazil.

– Honing, H. (2018). The Origins of Musicality. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

– Khenissi, M. A., Essalmi, F., Jemni, M., & Kinshuk. (2014). A Learning Version of Memory Match Game. 2014 IEEE 14th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, 209–210. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICALT.2014.67

Contact: prof. dr H. Honing

Starting date: Spring or Summer 2020.