The Faculty of Music constructed the Centre for Music and Science (CMS) as a purpose built wing of the University Music School in 2003 with the assistance of an award of £1.3 million from HEFCE and of funds from the University and the Colleges. The physical site comprises a fully sound-isolated Recording Studio (consisting of a Control Room and Recording Room, both linked to the Concert Hall and new Recital Room) a computer room and a research room.

The CMS, directed by Ian Cross, provides a home for research linking the field of music with psychology, acoustics, computer science and neuroscience. It is inherently cross-disciplinary, although the chief specialism of the centre is music cognition. With its dedicated studio facilities, the CMS supports technology-based graduate and staff research and teaching in music that requires technological resources. The other principal aim of the Centre is to provide a base for collaborative research with other departments in Cambridge and with those in outside institutions. The Centre was a partner in the organisation of the first conference on Language and Music as Cognitive Systems, held in Cambridge from 11 to 13 May 2007.

• the experimental archaeology of musical use of lithic artefacts - British Academy funded: Ian Cross, Ezra Zubrow (SUNY Buffalo, USA) and Frank Cowan; subsequent graduate research undertaken by Elizabeth Blake - see article in Archaeology magazine
• the development of a software control system for mixed electroacoustic performance - AHRB/ACE funded: Alejandro Viñao, Ian Cross and Shigeto Wada
• the cognition of relationships between non-adjacent events in tonal music - AHRC funded: Matthew Woolhouse, Tim Horton, Nick Collins and Ian Cross
• the perceptual correlates of acoustical characteristics of violins - Leverhulme Trust funded: Claudia Fritz, Jim Woodhouse (Dept of Engineering, Cambridge), Ian Cross, Brian Moore (Dept of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge) and Alan Blackwell (Computer Laboratory) - see article in Research Horizons
• the cognition of upbeats and downbeats - Fulbright Fellowship funded: Justin London (Carleton College, USA), Tommi Himberg and Ian Cross
• evolutionary perspectives on music - Ian Cross and Liz Tolbert (Johns Hopkins, USA)
• the affective correlates of global musical structure - Ian Cross and Dina Kronhaus
• everyday communicative interaction and correlates of the experience of musical time - Satinder Gill

• the use of agent-based approaches to explore the computational instantiation of cognitive and socially grounded musical behaviours, and undirected processes of music learning- Jonathan Impett; Ben Reis
• real-time computational musical interaction - Nick Collins
• interfaces for computational approaches to music composition and sequencing - Chris Nash
• computational approaches to implicit learning of musical structure - Martin Rohrmeier
• the cognitive and computational correlates of the musical phrase - Neta Spiro
• the investigation of real-time musical interaction in cultural context - Tommi Himberg
• memory systems involved in music - Sean Bennett
• group-theoretic correlates of the experience of tonal relations - Matthew Woolhouse
• musical pitch cognition in non-tonal contexts - Naomi Gregory
• the cognition of time in music - Jonathan Williams
• audio-visual scene analysis: attending to music in film - Nicola Phillips
• the 'folk-psychology' of piano pedagogy: concentration and attention - Erica Eyrich
• vocal affect and vocal attending - Joel Swaine
• everyday musical activity and musician identity - Joe Adams
• musical pitch cognition in the context of child development - Alex Lamont
• musical pitch cognition in the context of recent theories of constraints on the structure of formal systems - Tim Horton
• real-world musical correlates of emotion - Matthew Lavy
• the experimental cognitive archaeology of music: musical use of ancient lithic artefacts - Elizabeth Blake
• archaeological and biological-anthropological evidence for the possession of the capacity for musicality - Iain Morley; John Bispham; Laura Bolt
• embodied and interactive musicality - Nikki Moran

For further information on the activities of the CMS, contact Ian Cross (ic108 at cam.ac.uk)