RITMO is well into its second term, and all the new doctoral and postdoctoral fellows are deeply immersed in their projects. The common areas are constantly buzzing with lively discussions, fostering a collaborative and highly interdisciplinary research environment.
One exciting opportunity about having a centre over many years is the ability to develop long-term collaborations that can be sourced to support various initiatives. We increasingly see how researchers help each other and establish new constellations to answer questions they would never have thought of alone. These conversations are also stimulated by the many guest researchers from near and far. The visitors bring fresh perspectives, innovative ideas, and delicious sweets to share in the kitchen area, adding to the sense of community.
In addition to its scientific contributions, RITMO also engages in developing innovative education concepts, dissemination initiatives, and institutional systems. Here, we draw on our unique position comprising researchers from three departments and faculties that do not otherwise collaborate much. This includes everything from handling software purchases to updating web pages, conducting Open Research in practice, and career development.
You can read about this and many other things in this year's annual report, in rhythm, time, and motion.
Alexander Refsum Jensenius and Anne Danielsen
RITMO at a Glance
Rhythm is everywhere, from walking, talking, dancing and playing to telling stories about the past and predicting the future.
Our heartbeat, brain waves, and other bodily cycles work through rhythm. Rhythm is a crucial aspect of human action and perception. Our human rhythm also interacts with the world's cultural, biological, and mechanical rhythms.
At RITMO, we research rhythmic phenomena and the complex interplay between the human body and brain. The central idea is to establish a link between features of rhythmic phenomena in the world and within the (embodied) mind. The aim is to understand our ability to perceive rhythm and how this affects our actions and experiences.
RITMO is a highly interdisciplinary centre that combines perspectives and methods from music and media studies, philosophy and aesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, and informatics. Our research employs state-of-the-art methods, including motion capture, neuroimaging, pupillometry, machine learning, and robotics.
Structure & Aesthetics Cluster
We investigate the structure and aesthetics of musical rhythm and time. We are interested in rhythmical experiences and practices and how these can provide insights into perceptual processes, meaning-making, and sociocultural contexts. We examine the role of rhythm, temporal structure, and timing in the experience of music, both in terms of its aesthetic dimension and the cognitive processes underpinning the experience.
Highlights
- Polak contributed to a large cross-cultural comparison exploring the universality and diversity of rhythm perception across 15 countries. By analysing how participants from various cultural backgrounds reproduce rhythms, the researchers identified common features in rhythm cognition, such as discrete rhythm categories at small-integer ratios. These findings suggest that while there are universal aspects of rhythm perception, cultural practices significantly influence the importance of different rhythm patterns for different musical cultures.
- The TIME project ended last year and focused on microrhythm, the subtle timing variations within musical rhythms. In a recent paper, Danielsen and colleagues highlight the importance of conducting interdisciplinary timing research across musical cultures and contexts to identify both aspects of auditory perception shared by all perceivers and how such basic perceptual processes are modulated by learning and training.
- Vocal production in Hip-Hop is central to Oddekalv's research. He explored the concept of chimericity in rap vocal production, where multiple vocal tracks are layered to create a composite auditory stream. The study examined techniques like backtracks and back-to-back rapping, discussing their aesthetic implications and how they contribute to the unique sound of Hip-Hop.
- Br?vig and Aareskjold-Drecker investigated using vocal chops in music production, where short vocal samples are manipulated to create rhythmic and melodic patterns. The authors discuss how this technique blurs the line between human and machine, contributing to the evolving sound of contemporary music genres like EDM.
- A new paper by Serdar describes the impact of digital mediation on dance improvisation. Using an enactive perspective, the author discusses how digital tools influence dancers' creative processes and dramaturgical practices in hybrid and remote settings.
A Comprehensive AI-based System for Advanced Music Analysis
The project MIRAGE—A Comprehensive AI-Based System for Advanced Music Analysis (2019-2024) aimed to improve computers' capability to listen to and understand music. Its goal was to develop technologies that facilitate understanding and appreciation of music by generating rich and detailed descriptions. These encompass various dimensions, such as rhythm, tonality, formal structure, melodic shape, sound colour, and emotions. One main focus was the study of Norwegian Hardanger fiddle music. The work on designing applications for musicology, music cognition, and the general public is ongoing.
Musical Fragmentation
The project Musical Fragmentation investigates the aesthetics and pleasures of musical rhythms and grooves experienced as fragmented or related to machines. The focus is sample-based music, cut-and-paste and glitch aesthetics, and other experimental music expressions. The aim is to explore how listeners make meaning out of musical fragmentation and machine rhythms and how these experiences are related to cognitive processes.
Musical Microrhythm
The project TIME: Timing and Sound in Musical Microrhythm investigates interactions between temporal and sound-related features at the micro-level of rhythm in musical genres where rhythm is a core dimension. The aim is to gain new insights into the micro-level of auditory perception and the role of cultural background and/or training in music in this regard. This is based on qualitative and quantitative methodologies from musicology, ethnomusicology, music psychology, and motion research.
Musical Time and Form
The project Musical Time and Form investigates rhythm, meter, and expressivity in classical-romantic Western Art Music, focusing in particular on the music of Franz Schubert. The aim is to better understand the under-investigated rhythmic qualities of this repertoire, where the analytical focus has mainly been harmony and form.
Multimodal rhythm in music and dance from West Africa
The project DjembeDance – Multimodal rhythm in music and dance from West Africa studies rhythm in djembe drumming and dance from Mali. The aim is to understand rhythm as a multimodal phenomenon better. The collaborative project builds on an extensive live music and dance performance multimedia recordings dataset, combining multitrack audio, multi-camera video, and 3D motion tracking data.
Structure & Cognition Cluster
The goal is to expand our understanding of how rhythm and sense of time are constructed in the human mind. We study the influence of rhythm and time on perception, attention and effort, imagery and illusions, prediction and cognitive control processes across sensory modalities.
Highlights
- How do lesions to the orbitofrontal cortex affect auditory predictive processing? Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), Asko and colleagues found that patients with lesions showed impaired detection of auditory regularity violations at both local and global levels of the acoustic task structure. These findings indicate that the orbitofrontal cortex is crucial in hierarchical auditory predictive processing.
- Solli and colleagues explored how acoustic predictability and periodicity contribute to rhythm-based temporal expectations. Participants performed a pitch-identification task with different temporal sound sequences. The study found that both predictable periodic and aperiodic sequences enhanced perceptual performance compared to unpredictable ones, with periodic sequences showing a unique entrainment effect.
- A paper by Spiech and colleagues reports how oscillatory attention relates to the perception of musical groove. Using pupillometry and EEG, the researchers found that attentional fluctuations synchronised with the rhythmic structure of drumbeats, influencing participants' groove ratings. The study provides insights into the neural dynamics of attention in response to rhythmic stimuli.
- Two novel algorithms for anatomical registration of intracranial electrodes in humans are reported in a paper by Blenkmann and colleagues. The GridFit algorithm accurately localises electrodes in grids, strips, or depth arrays, while the CEPA algorithm compensates for brain shifts during electrode implantation. These methods improve the precision of electrode localisation, enhancing the utility of intracranial EEG data.
- In a Nature Communications article, RITMO researchers described how intracranial EEG revealed dissociable roles of neural ramping dynamics and theta oscillations in rule-guided behaviour. Increasing behavioural uncertainty shifted neural activity from purely oscillatory to mixed processing, with ramping dynamics and theta oscillations encoding different cognitive variables. These findings show how large-scale neural population activity supports goal-directed behaviour.
Mental Effort
The Mental Effort project investigates the engagement of attentional resources while carrying out a cognitive task. Mental effort can be measured behaviorally, subjectively and physiologically. Our approach focuses on the psychophysiological index provided by pupillometry and brain activity with fMRI. We are particularly interested in the inherent rhythmicity of attention, the effort related to various forms of temporal violation of regularity, and the effort used when processing information in different sensory modalities.
The Neural Basis of Temporal Prediction
A primary goal of The neural basis of temporal prediction project is to understand the neurocognitive basis of predictive processing in the human brain with particular attention to auditory stimuli and rhythm. We aim to decipher the neural mechanisms involved by using scalp and intracranial EEG, eye tracking and pupillometry concomitantly with cognitive tasks performed by healthy participants and individuals with brain disorders.
Neurophysiological Mechanisms of Human Auditory Predictions
The ability to predict upcoming events is a core feature of human cognition. In a broad sense, predictive processes incorporate knowledge from the past to predict future states of the body and the environment, shaping how we perceive the world. The project AudioPred - Neurophysiological Mechanisms of Human Auditory Predictions: From population- to single neuron recordings utilizes the unprecedented timing and anatomical detail offered by intracranial EEG recordings to uncover how auditory predictive processes are computed in the human brain.
Rhythm as an Individual Ability
Humans have an exceptional ability to perceive and produce rhythm, but rhythmic skills can differ substantially between people. The goal of the project Rhythm as an individual ability (INDRA) is to understand how and why rhythmic capabilities vary. To accomplish this, we investigate the basic cognitive, environmental, and genetic factors that shape rhythmicity. We are developing a test battery to cover various rhythm features, such as meter, beat, and microtiming.
Interaction & Pleasure Cluster
We seek to understand why rhythms make us move and how rhythm facilitates entrainment and interaction. We also explore the affective and social outcomes of musical and rhythmic processes. These phenomena are studied through the experience of absorption in musical performance and perception, music-related effort and skilled action, and the dynamics of music-evoked pleasure and social bonding.
Highlights
- Hansen and colleagues investigated the genetic and environmental factors influencing musical sensibility, which is the tendency to be emotionally and aesthetically engaged by the music. Using a sample of Norwegian twins, the researchers identified one general factor and four subdimensions of musical sensibility, all showing strong heritability. The findings highlight the significant genetic overlap across these dimensions.
- A paper by Nielsen and Martin discusses embodied experiences of live music using an enactive, affordance-based approach. They analysed audience responses from Musiclab Copenhagen with the Danish String Quartet to discuss how live musical engagement involves dynamic interactions between sensory modalities. The study emphasises the role of anticipation and embodied-enactive engagement in shaping the aesthetic experience of live music.
- Musical absorption is a phenomenon characterised by immersive and transformative musical encounters. Swarbrick and colleagues used data from MusicLab Copenhagen to investigate relationships between musical absorption and factors such as attention, affect, social context, and motion. The results suggest that live concerts facilitate greater musical absorption than live streams and that musical absorption is associated with feelings of awe, enjoyment, and movement.
- In another study on MusicLab Copenhagen, Upham and colleagues found a "stilling response," a pattern of audience motion in which listeners collectively decrease their movement in response to musical stillness. It appears that audience members anticipate moments of stillness in the music and suppress their movements accordingly. This behaviour is seen as nonverbal communication, indicating approval and attention to the performance.
- Bishop presented a model of musical togetherness, defined as the sense of connection that arises during real-time musical interaction. The model comprises three layers: knowledge and expectations, processes that enhance social and positive valence dimensions, and rewarding feelings of social connection, pleasure, and trust. The study highlights how musical togetherness fluctuates with the aesthetic quality of music and influences musicians' performance behaviour.
Bodies in Concert
Concerts bring audiences and musicians together in time, in place, and music. Bodies in Concert is a project exploring the movement and physiology of concert participants through various technologies adapted to the study of the musical experience.
Engagement and Absorption
Do time and timing matter for musical engagement and absorption? Music is well known for its ability to engage, yet the nature of this engagement remains elusive. The project Engagement and Absorption explores rhythm, temporality, and meaning in musical engagement, such as listening and performing. The project encompasses various research angles, including musical sense-making and ethics, absorption in musical performance, spatiality and immersion, and social interaction.
Entrainment, Social Bonding and Pleasure
The project Entrainment, Social Bonding and Pleasure aims to advance our understanding of how entrainment, synchronised behaviour and other related processes lead to prosocial outcomes such as social bonding. The project seeks to explore the role of empathy in interpersonal synchronisation and uncover the factors contributing to synchronous movement and social bonding in concerts. It also explores whether entrained listening can evoke affiliation towards fellow listeners, musicians, or social groups. The sub-project Quarantine Concerts project aims to explore virtual concerts' social and emotional effects.
Bodily Entrainment to Audiovisual Rhythms
Much focus has been devoted to understanding the "foreground" of human activities, such as the things we say, our actions, and the sounds we hear. The AMBIENT project will study the sonic and visual "background" of indoor environments, such as the sound of a ventilation system in an office, the footsteps of people in a corridor, or people fidgeting in a classroom. The project focuses on how different auditory and visual stimuli combine to create rhythms in various environments and how such rhythms influence people's bodily behaviours and feelings.
Musical Chills
The Musical Chills project investigates the brain processes and musical triggers underlying the intense, pleasurable 'chills' responses that music evokes. It explores the role of other neuromodulators (particularly the endogenous opioid system), via pharmacological agents, in the pleasurable response to music. Moreover, the project investigates what specific musical features can trigger chills.
MusicLab: Researching real-life concerts
MusicLab is an innovation project by RITMO and the University Library. The aim is to explore new methods for conducting research, research communication and education. Each MusicLab event is organised around a concert in a public venue, which is also the study object. The events also contain an edutainment element through panel discussions with world-leading researchers and artists and "data jockeying" in the form of live data analysis of recorded data.
Interaction & Robotics Cluster
We investigate aspects of rhythm and motion through robotics and technology. This includes creating interactive music systems focusing on multi-dimensional mapping from sensors to musical parameters. Moreover, we design and prototype adaptive robot systems and explore human-robot and robot-robot interactions in collective settings.
Highlights
- Jónsson and colleagues have developed a system that uses evolutionary algorithms for sonic exploration. The system leverages pattern-producing networks and neuroevolution and includes a web interface and open-source code to inspire creative sound design.
- Glitches in AI-generated dance sequences were explored in a recent study by Wallace and colleagues. Working with an experienced dancer, the researchers examined how glitches (i.e., physics-breaking mistakes) can inspire new movement patterns and break from traditional realism. The findings suggest glitches can be a creative catalyst, encouraging dancers to embody unfamiliar movements.
- How do expressive robot behaviours impact users' mental effort? Using pupillometry to measure cognitive load, van Otterdijk and colleagues found that the robot's appearance, viewing angle, and expressions significantly influence users' intuitive understanding of the robot's nonverbal cues. The insights will improve human-robot interactions by making them more efficient and intuitive.
- Karbasi and colleagues employed the ZRob platform to explore the use of intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning for robotic drumming. The robot uses both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards to learn and generate novel rhythmic patterns. The study highlights the potential of embodied intelligence in enhancing musical performance by robots.
- There is an increasing interest in multimodal music datasets, which integrate various data types such as audio, video, and human physiological data. Christodoulou and colleagues propose a definition of multimodality that spans different music disciplines and provides guidelines for constructing and evaluating these datasets. The goal is to enhance the transparency and reproducibility of music analysis.
Modelling and Robots
The Modelling and Robots project's core activity is investigating rhythm and motion through the design and construction of models and robots. This has applications to understanding natural processes and the creation of technological systems.
Musical Human-Computer Interaction
The core activity of the project Musical Human-Computer Interaction is investigating aspects of rhythm and motion through designing and constructing new interfaces for musical human-computer interaction. This includes studying and developing both acoustic instruments and completely digital systems. We are particularly interested in various types of electroacoustic devices in which we explore the complexity of human motion in musical experience and practice.
Predictive and Intuitive Robot Companion
The project Predictive and Intuitive Robot Companion (PIRC) combines sensing across multiple modalities with learned knowledge to predict outcomes and choose the best actions in robotic systems. The project applies machine learning and robotics expertise and collaborates with researchers in cognitive psychology to use recent human prediction models and action decision-making to perception-action loops of intelligent robot assistants.
Collective Robotics
Humans and many other vertebrates contain oscillatory neural networks known as central pattern generators that generate movement patterns. These networks can entrain to rhythms and adapt to social information. However, we still do not understand the underlying mechanisms very well. The project COllective ROBOtics through Real-time Entrainment of Evolved Dynamical Systems (COROBOREES) uses evolutionary methods to create complex dynamical systems to be used as central pattern generators with tunable social responsiveness in legged robots.
Integrated technologies for tracking organoid morphogenesis
There is a significant need to develop reliable human organ representations (termed organoids) for drug development, personalized drug testing, and organ transplantations in the long run. Integrated technologies for tracking organoid morphogenesis (ITOM) is a UiO:Life Science convergence environment project focused on advancing imaging technology and data analysis to improve stem cell-derived organ representations.
AUTORHYTHM – the role of autophagy in healthy ageing
Autophagy is the natural degradation of a cell that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components through a regulated mechanism. AUTORHYTHM – the role of autophagy in healthy ageing is a UiO:Life Science convergence environment project studying the recycling system of our cells in time and space to improve people's health and life span.
Platforms
The self-playing guitars are mechatronic/robotic devices that produce sounds utilizing the acoustics of a classic guitar body. Each guitar can sense audio and proximity activity and has a battery-powered onboard processing platform. Thus, the devices can be deployed in a decentralized, multi-guitar setup.
The ZRob is a robotic platform for exploring AI-based control of drum playing while exploiting the natural dynamics of the drum membrane and the drumstick.
RITMO in Numbers
Reported Research Results 2024
RITMO's researchers have published many scientific articles and book chapters in 2024, as well as one monograph. They have also given talks and presentations at several conferences. The Centre's research results also include several artistic outputs, media contributions and innovations. You can see all of RITMO's results reported in CRIStin.
People
A total of 60 people were employed at RITMO in 2024, 27 women, 1 non-binary and 32 men. We work to achieve gender balance in our recruitments.
The World at RITMO
RITMO is genuinely an international working environment. RITMO scholars come from all over the world: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Iran, Italy, Jordan, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and USA.
RITMO in the World
RITMO has research cooperation with partners from across the world: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Mali, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and USA.
RITMO Highlights
Numerous things are always happening at a research-intensive centre of RITMO's size. In 2024, we were particularly proud of two things.
Nordic Centre of Excellence meetup
In October, all RITMO researchers went to Gothenburg to meet with teams from the Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain (Jyv?skyl?), and the Center for Music in the Brain (Aarhus).
Abels KORK
In June, RITMO researchers conducted a large music experiment with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (KORK). This included measuring breathing, pulse, and motion, collecting survey data from everyone present, and interviewing a select group of musicians and audience members.
RITMO Stories
A project is always more than what you can read from a project page. Here, some of RITMO's researchers present their own research.
Sara D’Amario is a postdoctoral researcher at RITMO studying the cognitive, behavioral, and physiological components of music performance science.
Bj?rn Thor Jónsson is a doctoral fellow at RITMO studying if sounds discovered beyond the boundaries of prompting generative models, trained on existing data, can lead to creations that would otherwise not be conceived.
Heidi Umbach Hansen is a doctoral fellow at RITMO studying individual differences in musicality using the twin study method.
Sandra Solli is a doctoral fellow at RITMO studying the neural mechanisms underlying auditory temporal prediction and rhythm perception by combining EEG and behavioral experiments.
RITMO Seminar Series
The RITMO Seminar Series is a venue for presenting world-leading scholars. Based on our Green@RITMO policy, we usually invite our lecturers to stay for several days to make the most of their visit, including workshops and project group meetings. In 2024, we hosted five scholars. These events are open to the public and live-streamed to attract participants worldwide.
Disputations
We hosted two disputations in 2024. Congratulations to our two new doctors:
- Marieke van Otterdijk: How to Make Robots Intuitive Decision Makers? – Developing Intuitive Cognition for Robots by Studying Humans
- Mojtaba Karbasi: ZRob; Exploring Rhythmic Patterns and Emergent Behaviour in Robotic Drumming
Recognition
Arab Music and AI
RITMO PhD fellow Fadi Al-Ghawanmeh was interviewed by Eqyptian TV about his research on AI and Arab music after being featured during the grand opening ceremony of the 32nd Arab Music Conference in the Cairo Opera House.
TEDx talk
RITMO Director Alexander Refsum Jensenius presented the talk "Can doing nothing tell us everything?" at TEDxArendal, where he spoke about his annual still-standing project.
Dancing in the Aula
RITMO PhD fellow and dancer Diego Antonio Marin Bucio danced on stage at the University of Oslo Aula during the final Brain in the Centre event.
Microrhythm conference
RITMO Deputy Director Anne Danielsen held a keynote lecture at the Rhythm under the Microscope conference in September 2024 at University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Institute of Popular Music.
RITMO Behind the Scenes
Research is essential to RITMO, but there is so much more. Here, we give a few glimpses into everyday life and internal events of 2024.
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Scientific Advisory Board
RITMO's Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) met in December to discuss the plans for the last phase and the centre's exit strategy. The SAB is comprised of internationally renowned experts with extensive leadership experience who provided valuable feedback to the RITMO management and board.
Career Development
The Centres of Excellence at UiO organised a joint workshop on career development at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. This followed up on previous workshops that led to the establishment of RITMO's career development programme, which is mandatory for all RITMO recruits.
Centre of Excellence Legacy
RITMO took the initiative for a workshop discussing the legacy of Centres of Excellence after their 10-year lifespan, addressing issues like website preservation, media archiving, and data management. It brought together past and present centre managers with support units to find solutions beneficial for the entire organisation.
RITMO People
Scientific Advisory Board
The members of RITMO's Scientific Advisory Board are highly acclaimed researchers within their respective fields. The Board is vital to providing feedback on on-going and future research, and its members have been carefully chosen to support the different parts of RITMO.
Board
Management
Postdoctoral Fellows and Researchers
PhD Fellows
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Technical/Administrative Staff
Assistants
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Guest researchers
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Alicja Terelak, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland
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Arthur Coron, ENSTA Bretagne, France
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Calvin James Tyler, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
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Catalina Lomos, University of Groningen, Netherlands
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Connor Spiech, McGill University, Canada
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David L?berg Code, Western Michigan University, United States
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David Quiroga Martinez, Aarhus University, Denmark
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Eyyüb Güven, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland
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Gnanathusharan “Thusha" Rajendran, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom
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Juliet Merchant, independent composer, United Kingdom
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Justin London, Carleton College, United States
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Katharina Egger, University of Vienna, Austria
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Krzysztof Basiński, Medical University in Gdańsk, Poland
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Luiz Rogério Jorgensen Carrer, Federal University of S?o Paulo, Brazil
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Mariana Cardoso, Federal University of S?o Paulo, Brazil
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Maxime Michaud, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
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Natalia Kubik, Medical University of Gdańsk, Poland
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Raquel Aparicio Terrés, University of Barcelona, Spain
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Rebecca Armstrong, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
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Riya Sidhu, Western University, Canada
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Tomás Skála, Charles University, Czech Republic
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Vilde Aaslid, University of Rhode Island, United States
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Vilma Anniina Hurttia, ?bo Akademi University, Finland
A Centre of Excellence in Norway
