Henkjan Honing endowed chair in music cognition
Dr H.J. Honing (1959) has been named professor by special appointment of Music Cognition at the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Humanities, effective 1 September 2010. The coming three years he will be hold the Hendrik Muller chair, designated on behalf of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences' (KNAW) Academy Chairs in the Humanities Foundation.
Henkjan Honing conducts
research into the role of perception, attention, expectation and memory
in the process of listening to music, and studies the cognitive
mechanisms underlying (human) musicality. His research involves the use
of theoretical, empirical and computational methods.
Working in
collaboration with Hungarian colleagues, Honing's research group
recently demonstrated that babies are capable of hearing the beat in
music, a result supporting the view that beat-induction (or a sense of
rhythm) is an innate and music-specific skill. The study also suggests
that this natural sense of rhythm may have played an important role in
the evolution of music. Over the coming years, Honing will be seeking to
further expand his research in three sub-areas. Firstly, he will be
conducting research on the mechanisms underlying human musicality, such
as a sense of rhythm and relative pitch. Secondly, he will be working to
further develop and evaluate the computational modelling methods
developed over the past few years, with a special focus on the role of
surprise within such models. Thirdly, he will be further exploring the
potential use of the Internet in researching how we listen to music.
Honing
obtained his PhD at City University (London) in 1991 with research into
the representation of time and temporal structure in music. During the
period between 1992 and 1997, he worked as a KNAW researcher at the
University of Amsterdam's Institute for Logic, Language and Computation
(ILLC), where he conducted a study on the formalisation of musical
knowledge. Up until 2003, he worked as a research coordinator at the
Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information (NICI) where he
specialised in the computational modelling of musical cognition. In
2007, he was appointed associate professor in Musical Cognition at the
University of Amsterdam's Musicology capacity group. He conducts his
research projects under the auspices of the ILLC and the University of
Amsterdam's Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA). Honing has
authored over one hundred and fifty international publications in the
area of musical cognition and music technology. He recently published a
book for the general public entitled Iedereen is muzikaal. Wat
we weten over het luisteren naar muziek (Nieuw Amsterdam, 2009).
About the Hendrik Muller chair