It could be called “musical brain surgery” but Stephen McAdams is not looking for disease. He’s looking at how music moves us to tears, energizes us and calms us. He wants to know how we perceive it and how computers can help us analyze it.
The Canada Research Chair in Music Perception and Cognition and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT – pronounced Kermit), McAdams has an ensemble of researchers that are fast making the Centre the world’s epicentre for investigating music in the human brain.
“In my work, there are lots of different domains – neuroscience, music theory, acoustics, psychology,” says McAdams, a musician, audiologist and psychologist. “McGill has some of the best people in the world here, and provides a fertile ground for interdisciplinary approaches. CIRMMT couldn’t exist otherwise.”
The 2005 opening of the CIRMMT labs began a crescendo of research. The opera rehearsal studio in the basement captures, through motion lasers and cameras, the movements and breathing patterns of the singers. In other labs, motion suits reflect musicians’ gestures before camcorders, while engineers and designers test how to equalize high-definition sound. Someday, their discoveries might be applied in cinema or home-theatre design or even in creating a new type of “virtual concert,” that has chest-throbbing sound waves on a pulsing floor.
With all this high-tech equipment at CIRMMT, there’s often nowhere to sit. Speakers are propped on plastic milk cartons. Sound controllers are nestled in styrofoam shipping boxes. The Centre may be an unfinished symphony but the pursuit of knowledge continues. “Montreal is becoming a world leader in music psychology research,” McAdams says. “Music technology can help us with how we get it, make it, consume it. It will help us to answer the questions of who we are.”