School of Critical Studies

Rhythms in Scotland

Call for papers: Perspectives on Rhythm and Timing

A three-day interdisciplinary workshop, Perspectives on Rhythm and Timing, will be held at the University of Glasgow, UK, on July 19-21, 2012.

The PoRT workshop is dedicated to empirical research and theoretical modelling of timing and rhythm in speech and music, in perception and action. Each day of the event will have an orientation session, with two invited talks on contrasting themes followed by a discussion by one respondent. Research papers and posters will be presented in the afternoons. Additionally, a tutorial on coupled oscillator modelling of dynamical systems will be held on the third day.

Invited speakers are as follows:

Linguistic-phonetic perspectives
Speakers: Francis Nolan, Alice Turk
Discussant: Jelena Krivokapic

Neurobiological perspectives
Speakers: Edward Large, Sophie Scott
Discussant: Sarah Hawkins

Clinical perspectives
Speakers: Sonja Kotz, Anja Lowit
Discussant: Katie Overy

Tutorial on coupled oscillator modelling
Speakers: Fred Cummins, Edward Large

We welcome submissions from researchers working on rhythm and timing in any discipline, including neurobiology, musicology, linguistic phonetics, forensics, computational modelling, psychology, clinical linguistics, and sociology.

Send your abstract of maximally one page by 18 December, 2011 to port.workshop@gmail.com. The template for the abstract submissions is provided here: PoRT-template. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by 1 March 2012. For further information, please contact the organisers at port.workshop@gmail.com.

Selected contributions to the workshop are intended to be published in a thematically coherent edited volume (envisaged publisher: Cambridge University Press). When submitting an abstract, please indicate whether you would be interested in your work being published in the volume. Full paper submissions are expected no later than September 1, 2012 and will subsequently be reviewed by two independent reviewers.

The workshop is supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The organisers will aim for the conference fee not to exceed £100 with reduced rates available to students, unwaged and delegates from countries listed as “low economic resources countries” by the World Bank.

The organisers are Tamara Rathcke and Rachel Smith.

Scientific Committee:

Rhythms in Scotland is a workshop programme funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. We plan to run a series of events on rhythm in Glasgow and Edinburgh during 2011-2012, culminating in the three-day international workshop, Perspectives on Rhythm and Timing , in July 2012.

The award holders are Tamara Rathcke and Rachel Smith (University of Glasgow) and the project is being developed in collaboration with Fred Cummins (University College Dublin), Anja Lowit (University of Strathclyde), and Katie Overy (University of Edinburgh).

A one-day symposium, Approaches to Rhythm and Timing in Scotland Today (ARTiST), is planned to be held in April 2012 at the University of Edinburgh. In Scotland today, there are several independent developing research programmes concerning rhythm in speech, poetry and music, as well as unparalleled expertise in other relevant areas, such as the languages and dialects of Scotland, and the nature of social interaction more generally. At this stage, it is essential to form a network around the unified theme of rhythm. The role of such a network will be to establish a programme of knowledge exchange between researchers and a process of knowledge transfer to inform current practice in the arts and science of communication.

To participate in ARTiST, we will invite researchers who are based in Scotland and working on rhythm or closely related topics. In the morning session, the participants will be asked to briefly present their lab facilities, research programmes and complementary data, and to outline open questions they are interested in pursuing. The afternoon session will consist of several focus groups, each guided by a designated discussion leader, on themes identified in advance on the basis of participants’ interests. This schedule will initiate knowledge exchange and reveal the potential for collaborations.

As a collaborative project between the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, a half-day seminar on rhythm models will be held in March 2012 at the Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) Unit of the University of Strathclyde. The seminar aims to introduce students of phonetics and SLT to current models of rhythm and timing.

The organisers, Anja Lowit, Tamara Rathcke and Rachel Smith, will give orientation lectures from clinical and linguistic-phonetic perspectives, and initiate and lead a discussion of common themes. The theoretical introduction will be followed by a hands-on work on data from clinical praxis in small groups, which will facilitate transfer of skills between the two student groups. The seminar may also be of interest to speech and language therapy practitioners, or clinical groups such as members of the Ataxia UK Scottish support network. 

Since non-native learners frequently struggle with the prosodic aspects of English, and the rhythms of Scottish accents differ dramatically from those of the widely-taught varieties Southern British or Mainstream American, we expect considerable advantages to result from training in production and perception of Scottish rhythms as opposed to other varieties of English.

In autumn 2011, we are planning to organise two half-day tutorials on rhythmic aspects of English as foreign language at the University of Glasgow. International students and lecturers of Glasgow universities are welcome to participate. More information about these events will be available in August 2011.