Nomination: Professor Maurício Alves Loureiro, Department of Instruments and Singing, UFMG School of Music
Period: 07/30/2007 to 08/17/2007
The Prof. Dr. Marc Leman is a researcher in systematic musicology at the University of Ghent (Belgium) and coordinator of the Department of Art, Music and Theater Sciences. An authority in the field of musical perception, musical cognition and their applications in musical information retrieval and interactive musical systems, Prof. Leman is a promoter of a number of major projects together with the FWO (Belgian Fund for Scientific Research), IWT (Private Industrial Organization), and BOF (Ghent University Fund). Furthermore, Prof. Leman has participated in several European projects, including MEGA (Multisensory Applications of Expressive Gesture), ConGAS (Audio Control through Gestures), S2S^2 (From Sound to Sense, from Sense to Sound).
He was editor of the Journal of New Music Research from 1987 to 2004, and organized numerous scientific and academic meetings, such as the International Summer School in Systematic Musicology, organized within the EU-SOCRATES project, always related to systematic musicology. . Holder of a vast list of publications, Prof. Leman works as a consultant for the European Union and is frequently invited as a speaker at the most diverse international conferences.
Marc Leman and his team of researchers at Ghent University study music from an interdisciplinary point of view, with an interest in how people deal with music, in relation to its production, distribution and consumption. Its approach is quite innovative, in that it uses methods from different disciplines, such as classical musicology, philosophy, computer science, psychology, biology, sociology and brain science, which include signal processing, experimental behavior research, computational modeling, processing statistical.
In his book recently published by MIT Press, entitled Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, in which he presents his vision of the future perspectives of music research, Leman assumes that the body plays a central role in any musical activity, and basing his approach on the hypothesis of a relationship between musical experience (mind) and sound energy (matter), arguing that the human body is a biologically designed mediator that transfers physical energy to a mental level – activating experiences, values, and intentions – and, in an inverse process, transfers mental representations to material form. It further suggests that this idea of the body as mediator provides a promising framework for thinking about technology-mediated music and argues that, under certain conditions, the natural mediator (the body) can be extended by artificial mediators through technology mediation, exploring the necessary conditions for this and analyzing how they can be studied.