ANNUAL REPORT 2012/13 - HIGHLIGHTS
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2012/13 was another successful year for the centre, marked by new sources of finance, new students, and a regular turnover of academic publications and presentations.
Gerd Grupe (University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz) and Richard Parncutt were granted 85K€ by Land Steiermark within the program “Exciting Science” for a project entitled Music, Religion, Integration: Muslims in Styria. The project is now financing a half-time project position. We welcome to our centre Hande Sağlam, former doctoral student with Ursula Hemetek at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the Music University in Vienna.
Other collaborations with the University of Music and Performing Arts included the FWF project SysSon: A systematic procedure to develop sonifications. Parncutt advised on research procedures and coordinated a masters-level seminar on “Aesthetics in Sonification”.
Martina Koegeler-Abdi and Richard Parncutt published a book of revised contributions to the conference on Applied Interculturality Research (cAIR) which the centre organised in 2010. The book is entitled Interculturality: Practice meets Research, and is published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Among Bernd Brabec de Mori’s steady stream of international presentations and publications in the area of ethnomusicology was a special issue of Ethnomusicology Forum entitled “The Human and Non-human in Indigenous Lowland South American Music”, which he edited. It is the first collection
of essays explicitly dealing with inter-specific communication as conceptualised in indigenous ontologies of that region. Contributors include Anthony Seeger and Rafael José de Menezes Bastos. In August 2013, Brabec de Mori took up a new five-year position as “senior scientist” at the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz.
Zuzana Cenkerová, a doctoral student at Comenius University, Bratislava, was guest researcher at the centre from September 2012 to January 2013, funded by an Ernst Mach fellowship. She completed an empirical research project on the dependency of melodic expectations on learning and musical style under the supervision of Parncutt, and collaboration is continuing.
Another highlight was the conference “Music and Emotion” in Jyväsklyä, Finland, organized by our colleagues at the Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research. The conference was attended by several members of our centre, all of whom were actively involved in presentations: Erica Bisesi, Florian Eckl, Richard Parncutt, and two informal doctoral students of Parncutt, Zuzana Cenkerová (Bratislava) and Karim Weth (Salzburg). Other conference presentations are listed in the chronology.
The centre’s internet presentation was given a facelift. After a protracted battle with innovative software, Bernd Brabec de Mori launched the centre’s new homepage at sysmus.uni-graz.at. One is not supposed to mention failed grant applications in an annual report, but in this case an exception may be warranted. Parncutt’s FWF application entitled Pitch perception and missing fundamentals in musical sounds was highly praised by both anonymous reviewers, but one of them also criticised some detail, whereupon FWF classified the application as fundable but not funded. On almost the same day, a long letter from the FWF Kuratorium was published in the national newspaper Der Standard arguing for improved funding for FWF, since the number and quality of applications is steadily rising every year. We are revising and resubmitting.
