Researchers at the Music Cognition Group of the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) are launching a new website that allows visitors to participate in an online listening experiment.
The experiment is designed to measure the sensitivity of listeners to timing and tempo in music of different styles such as Classical, Jazz and Rock. Earlier experiments in music perception usually required listeners to be physically present in the laboratory in order to gather their responses. The work of the MCG is new in placing such experiments on the Internet, on a website accessible to anyone with a typical computer with a broadband connection to the Internet and capable of playing sound, and of course with an interest in music.
 
The principal researcher is Olivia Ladinig, member of the Music Cognition Group and a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the UvA. In this research she will study the effect of expertise (eg, formal musical training) and exposure (preferred listening) on listener judgments of listeners with a wide variety of musical backgrounds. A first version of these series of online listening experiment will be published in June in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Production. Ladinig’s study is one of the first systematic studies making use of web-based listening experiments and is part of the European research project Emergent Cognition through Active Perception (EmCAP) funded by the European Commission (see http://www.hum.uva.nl/mmm/EmCAP/ ).