̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Faculty of Music

Cambridge Festival celebrates pioneering women for International Women’s Day

zs332 — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:28:52 +0000

For International Women’s Day (8 March), the Cambridge Festival (19 March – 4 April) is celebrating some of the remarkable contributions of women across diverse fields. From philosophy and music to AI and cosmology, the festival will highlight the pioneering work of women who have shaped our understanding of the world in profound ways.

Time, crime and how can the arts interact with a Natural World in decline?

zs332 — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 10:44:21 +0000

Each year the Cambridge Festival’s (13-28 March 2024) rich programme of events celebrates the arts across the city and this year is no exception.

Pythagoras was wrong: there are no universal musical harmonies, study finds

ta385 — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:30:00 +0000

According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, ‘consonance’ – a pleasant-sounding combination of notes – is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these ‘integer ratios’ are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music ‘dissonant’, unpleasant sounding.

But researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong.

Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows that in normal listening contexts, we do not actually prefer chords to be perfectly in these mathematical ratios.

“We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us,” said co-author, Dr Peter Harrison, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Music and Director of its Centre for Music and Science.

̽��ֱ��researchers also found that the role played by these mathematical relationships disappears when you consider certain musical instruments that are less familiar to Western musicians, audiences and scholars. These instruments tend to be bells, gongs, types of xylophones and other kinds of pitched percussion instruments. In particular, they studied the ‘bonang’, an instrument from the Javanese gamelan built from a collection of small gongs.

“When we use instruments like the bonang, Pythagoras's special numbers go out the window and we encounter entirely new patterns of consonance and dissonance,” said Dr Harrison, a Fellow of Churchill College.

“ ̽��ֱ��shape of some percussion instruments means that when you hit them, and they resonate, their frequency components don’t respect those traditional mathematical relationships. That's when we find interesting things happening.”

“Western research has focused so much on familiar orchestral instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, because of their shape and physics, are what we would call ‘inharmonic’.

̽��ֱ��researchers created an online laboratory in which over 4,000 people from the US and South Korea participated in 23 behavioural experiments. Participants were played chords and invited to give each a numeric pleasantness rating or to use a slider to adjust particular notes in a chord to make it sound more pleasant. ̽��ֱ��experiments produced over 235,000 human judgments.

̽��ֱ��experiments explored musical chords from different perspectives. Some zoomed in on particular musical intervals and asked participants to judge whether they preferred them perfectly tuned, slightly sharp or slightly flat. ̽��ֱ��researchers were surprised to find a significant preference for slight imperfection, or ‘inharmonicity’. Other experiments explored harmony perception with Western and non-Western musical instruments, including the bonang.

Instinctive appreciation of new kinds of harmony

̽��ֱ��researchers found that the bonang’s consonances mapped neatly onto the particular musical scale used in the Indonesian culture from which it comes. These consonances cannot be replicated on a Western piano, for instance, because they would fall between the cracks of the scale traditionally used.

“Our findings challenge the traditional idea that harmony can only be one way, that chords have to reflect these mathematical relationships. We show that there are many more kinds of harmony out there, and that there are good reasons why other cultures developed them,” Dr Harrison said.

Importantly, the study suggests that its participants – not trained musicians and unfamiliar with Javanese music – were able to appreciate the new consonances of the bonang’s tones instinctively.

“Music creation is all about exploring the creative possibilities of a given set of qualities, for example, finding out what kinds of melodies can you play on a flute, or what kinds of sounds can you make with your mouth,” Harrison said.

“Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively appreciate, they don’t need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy.”

Exciting opportunities for musicians and producers

Dr Harrison hopes that the research will encourage musicians to try out unfamiliar instruments and see if they offer new harmonies and open up new creative possibilities.

“Quite a lot of pop music now tries to marry Western harmony with local melodies from the Middle East, India, and other parts of the world. That can be more or less successful, but one problem is that notes can sound dissonant if you play them with Western instruments.

“Musicians and producers might be able to make that marriage work better if they took account of our findings and considered changing the ‘timbre’, the tone quality, by using specially chosen real or synthesised instruments. Then they really might get the best of both worlds: harmony and local scale systems.”

Harrison and his collaborators are exploring different kinds of instruments and follow-up studies to test a broader range of cultures. In particular, they would like to gain insights from musicians who use ‘inharmonic’ instruments to understand whether they have internalised different concepts of harmony to the Western participants in this study.

Reference

R Marjieh, P M C Harrison, H Lee, F Deligiannaki, and N Jacoby, ‘Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales’, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45812-z

̽��ֱ��tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. ̽��ֱ��findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures.

There are many more kinds of harmony out there

Peter Harrison

Pythagoras was wrong: there are no universal harmonies! | Cambridge research

Andrew Otto via Flikr under a CC license

A man playing a bonang

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge achievers recognised in 2024 New Year Honours list

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 09:46:09 +0000

Professor Dame Carol Black is awarded a Dame Grand Cross (GBE) for public service. Black was Principal of Newnham College from 2012-2019 and formerly a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. GBE is the highest rank in the Order, and rarely awarded, to recognise the most exceptional and sustained service to the UK. Since its creation in 1917, fewer than 80 women have been awarded a GBE.

She said: “I am absolutely delighted to have been made a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. This award comes almost 20 years after I received a DBE for services to medicine and recognises the progress being made to tackle some of the most entrenched and interrelated problems in society – poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and drug dependency. My heartfelt thanks go to everyone who has helped and supported me, and to those individuals doing great work on the frontline to change culture and practice.”

Composer Judith Weir, Honorary Fellow and alumna of King’s College, Cambridge, is awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to music. Weir is Master of the King’s Music, having been appointed by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014, and has twice written a specially-commissioned carol for the college’s A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

Organist, conductor and broadcaster Anna Lapwood, Janeway Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, is awarded Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to music. Lapwood reaches a huge audience through her concerts and via social media with over 1 million followers across all platforms. Her passion for the organ is matched by her mission to support girls and women in music.

She said: “When you work as a musician, so much of what you do isn't quantifiable or finite - your work on a certain piece is never 'finished', and your playing is always changing and developing. Receiving this award feels like something concrete - a deeply significant moment in my musical journey.”

Gerard Grech, former CEO and Founder of Tech Nation, is awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to the technology sector. He joined Cambridge Enterprise this year to lead a new flagship initiative, 'Founders at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge', that will support ̽��ֱ�� founders to make an even greater impact on the world in the technology and software sectors.

Grech said: “I’m honoured to have been recognised for my contribution to the growing success of the UK’s tech and startup sector which is increasingly creating globally important tech and science-backed companies, from my time at Tech Nation. This honour is also recognition of the founders, ecosystem experts, investors, policy makers, and my colleagues who generously shared their knowledge and insights to support the UK’s most ambitious tech entrepreneurs. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to them all for all their hard work.”

Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan, Enterprise Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, and former student in the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Engineering, is awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to innovation technology. As Founder & President of PervasID he pioneered the world’s most accurate battery-free, real-time location tracking technology which is now in use by several NHS trusts, the largest aircraft manufacturers, airlines and blue-chip retailers.

He said: “I am absolutely delighted; this is a great honour and testament to the hard work and innovation of the entire team at PervasID. Our products offer a national and international benefit and we will continue to pioneer technology that has a wider value to society as a whole.”

Professor Ann Prentice, Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the ̽��ֱ��’s MRC Epidemiology Unit, is awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to British and Global Public Health Nutrition. A former director of the MRC Elsie Widdowson Laboratory (previously MRC Human Nutrition Research) at Cambridge, and programme leader of the MRC Nutrition and Bone Health Research Group at Cambridge, she was also head of the calcium, vitamin D and bone health research team at MRC Unit ̽��ֱ��Gambia. Her research is focused on life-course nutritional requirements for population health, with an emphasis on calcium and vitamin D, and encompasses the nutritional problems of both affluent and resource-limited societies.

She said: “I am delighted to receive this honour on behalf of all the people, in this country and worldwide, who have worked with me to improve our understanding of the links between nutrition and health.”

Dr Gillian Tett, Provost at Kings College, Cambridge, is awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to Economic Journalism. Tett, a former student at the ̽��ֱ��, is currently Chairman of the US Editorial Board and America Editor-at-Large of the Financial Times. She became the 45th Provost at King’s College in October 2023, and is renowned for her warnings ahead of the financial crisis of 2008.

Tett said: “I am deeply honoured to receive an OBE - and hope this helps to champion the importance of British intellectual capital, both in journalism and higher education. Thank you to everyone who has helped me in my career!”

Joan Winterkorn is awarded Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to heritage and culture. She is an expert on archives and literary and historical manuscripts, and was formerly in the antiquarian and rare book trade. In Cambridge she played a vital role in enabling the Churchill Archive Centre to acquire the papers of Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Thatcher and the ̽��ֱ�� Library to gain those of Siegfried Sassoon and Dame Margaret Drabble. In 2019 she received the honorary degree of Master of Arts from the ̽��ֱ��.

Maxine Purdie, Head of Catering and Conferences at Girton College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, is awarded an MBE for services to knowledge exchange. Prior to arriving at Girton, she spent two decades at PraxisAuril, a world-leading professional association for knowledge exchange practitioners, where she became CEO and a Board Director.

Dr Rosie Trevelyan, Director of the Tropical Biology Association, is awarded an MBE for her services to environmental science and International conservation. Over the last three decades, Trevelyan developed the Tropical Biology Association into a globally respected organisation that offers an exceptionally high standard of ecology and conservation training to scientists, project managers and educators working to manage and safeguard tropical biodiversity in the long term. This international NGO has offices in the David Attenborough Building, Cambridge, UK and at Nature Kenya in Nairobi, Kenya.

Professor Elizabeth Robertson, an alumna and Honorary Fellow of Darwin College, has been appointed a CBE. Recognised as a world leader in mammalian developmental genetics, Robertson‘s early work focused on embryonic stem cell gene targeting, a technique that pioneered the ability to genetically alter mice. She initiated this work as a post-doctoral fellow with Sir Martin Evans at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. “It was a big surprise and extremely gratifying to have received this honour,” Robertson said.

̽��ֱ��Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby (Alumnus and Honorary Fellow of Trinity College), was appointed GCVO (Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order).

̽��ֱ��Dean of Westminster, David Hoyle (Alumnus of Corpus Christi College, Honorary Fellow and former Fellow of Magdalene College) was appointed KCVO (Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order).

Maxine Ficarra, formerly Chief Executive Officer of PraxisAuril, the UK's professional association for Knowledge Exchange practitioners, has been made an MBE for her services to Knowledge Exchange. She led the not-for-profit, which was co-founded in 2002 by Professor David Secher, Life Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, and former Director of Research Services at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, for 20 years.

Also in 2024, Robert Chartener, a Fellow Commoner of Magdalene College and Chairman of the Magdalene Foundation, was awarded an Honorary OBE for services to Higher Education. It relates primarily to years of fundraising, both for Magdalene and for the support of its students.

Academics and staff associated with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge feature in the 2024 list, which recognises the achievements and service of people across the UK, from all walks of life.

Senate house

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Disappearing notes show dramatic loss of whales

jg533 — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 08:00:37 +0000

A Cambridge team frustrated by the apathetic response to biodiversity loss has developed a dramatic new way to highlight the demise of nature – and people are listening.

Early-career researchers win major European grants

ta385 — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 07:30:00 +0000

Cambridge has been awarded ten European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants, more than any other UK institution

Music inspired by a survivor of the Nazis wins international recognition

ehs33 — Fri, 24 May 2019 14:18:19 +0000

BBC Radio 3 have selected a new orchestral composition by the Music Faculty’s Reader in Composition, Richard Causton to represent the UK at the annual International Rostrum of Composers to be broadcast across 27 countries worldwide. ̽��ֱ��Rostrum is run in association with UNESCO and the International Music Council.

̽��ֱ��piece - Ik zeg: NU - was based on a story of survival. Three quarters of the World War II Jewish population of the Netherlands were killed by the Nazis. One of some 16,000 Dutch Jews to survive the war was a relative of Richard Causton, Salomon Van Son (now 98 years old), who survived Nazi persecution hidden in a hay barn for almost three years. ̽��ֱ��farmer who hid him was interrogated by the Germans repeatedly but never revealed where he was. This work is based on Salomon Van Son’s memoir about his experience.

Richard explained, “ ̽��ֱ��title, Ik zeg: NU (‘I say: Now’) comes from Sal van Son’s ten-year-old great nephew, who remarked philosophically, ‘I say now now, and a moment later it is already history’.

“This child-like observation of how time passes seemed a brilliant description for music and how we experience it; but beyond that, it also describes life itself. We can never hang on to the moment, it is always slipping through our fingers. So my piece is about the passage of time and a homage to my 98-year-old relative, whose book traces the history of his Jewish family through four centuries, including his own years in hiding from the Nazis in occupied Holland during the Second World War.”

Richard constructed a new set of specially-tuned tubular bells especially for use in the piece, and together with the sounds of detuned vibraphones, a prepared piano and accordion, their haunting, resonant sound evokes the complex and elusive nature of passing time. ̽��ֱ��piece was commissioned by the BBC for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and was first performed at the Barbican Hall, London, in January to huge critical acclaim.

“Richard Causton's new work for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Ik zeg: NU, holds two timeframes in play simultaneously, and brilliantly.” ( ̽��ֱ��Guardian)

“Now-ness and then-ness move in parallel in this spacious, beautifully constructed work.” ( ̽��ֱ��Times)

“It was a fabulously ear-tickling display of compositional skill, which every now and then took on a poetic resonance.” ( ̽��ֱ��Daily Telegraph)

Image: Richard Causton pencil score of Ik zeg: NU

A new orchestral composition - Ik zeg: NU by Richard Causton - has been chosen by BBC Radio 3 for worldwide broadcast.

BBCSO Credit Sim Canetty-Clark

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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A new educational initiative – Roots – makes music a priority

ehs33 — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 09:57:29 +0000

Cambridgeshire secondary school pupils had the chance to put into practice their new singing talents – from music from the Middle Ages through to the present day – at a public concert in Trinity College Chapel on March 19.

For the past 5 months, the students from North Cambridge Academy and Sir Harry Smith Community College have been training alongside professional musicians thanks to an innovative music programme that seeks to close a gap in school education.

̽��ֱ��three-year project focuses on helping students develop both vocal and instrumental skills through regular workshops with professional musicians from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Associate Ensemble VOCES8 and ̽��ֱ��Brook Street Band. Using the ‘VOCES8 method’, teachers and students are encouraged to learn through participation, using vocal and rhythmic exercises that develop their music skills and confidence.

“Amidst the current environment of low funding for education, many local schools in Cambridgeshire struggle to make basic provision for music,” explains Dr Sam Barrett, one of the organisers of the programme, called Roots. “Music can help children develop skills and confidence that can underpin many other aspects of their educational journey. Roots aims to redress the balance by providing a new model for future music education within primary and secondary schools in the region.”

One teacher remarked: “One of the Year 8 [aged 12-13] boys struggles with dyslexia and his academic work. He is not confident – due no doubt to this learning difficulty - and finds it hard to make friends. This project is making a real difference for him. Not only has he stood up with his group to lead, he has introduced his group and as the day went on, began to comfortably lead some warm-ups.” A Year 8 boy added: “I feel more confident after the choir leadership project, I would now put myself out there for more and more things.”

Roots involves the regional music education hub, Cambridgeshire Music; two charities, Cambridge Early Music and the VCM Foundation; and is supported by both Anglia Ruskin ̽��ֱ�� and Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Faculty of Music, for instance, have been working with teachers to help develop lesson plans informed by their latest insights.

A parallel instrumental strand is being developed by Anglia Ruskin ̽��ֱ�� to establish a tangible legacy by founding a period instrument ensemble specifically for under 18s. Specialist coaching will be provided through workshops, access to historic instruments and the Brook Street Band’s innovative online resource Handel Digital, culminating in performance opportunities.

̽��ֱ��concert at Trinity College represents the completion of the first phase of the project. Responses from the schools involved have been overwhelmingly positive both from teachers and pupils alike. As one teacher said: “Another pupil in year 8 has behavioural difficulties – often out of lessons and unable to manage in a regular classroom. She loves music. This project has given her an incentive to better manage her behaviour so that she can participate. She has been able to attend the training sessions and now, having helped lead warm-ups for the children she has something to feel very proud of.”

Funding for the first year of the ROOTS project has been provided by the Helen Hamlyn Trust and the SoundMe project sponsored by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). Individuals or societies interested in supporting years 2 and 3 of the project are invited to contact Dr Sam Barrett for further information.

Cambridge researchers and musicians are helping to support schools in Cambridgeshire to deliver high quality and sustainable music provision over the next three years.

Amidst the current environment of low funding for education, many local schools in Cambridgeshire struggle to make basic provision for music

Dr Sam Barrett

Andrew Wilkinson Photography.

ROOTS concert at Trinity College Cambridge

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