Cross-Disciplinary Lecture Series: Lecture 2, 10/29!

The GSA is pleased to announce the second lecture for the Cross-Disciplinary Lecture Series, which aims to pair scholars from different departments and schools within Rice to address a common theme for the education of the Rice community at-large:

"Musical Structure and Perception"

I. Composition and Musical Structure, Dr. Arthur Gottschalk, Shepherd School of Music

II. Auditory Perception and Processing, Dr. James R. Pomerantz, Department of Psychology

WHEN: Thursday October 29th at 4:00 PM in Keck 100.

This two-part talk will feature two impressive speakers with extensive experience with the composition and perception of music, respectively: Dr. Arthur Gottschalk of the Shepherd School of Music will riff on musical form, structure, grammar, rhetoric, and vocabulary, and why many of these elements are as they are in Western music, with reasons ranging from physical to physiological to neurophysiological to purely cultural, and Dr. James R. Pomerantz of Psychology will approach the subject from the aspect of auditory perception and processing, variously touching upon such ideas as temporal pattern perception paradigm / tock tick / grouping, the cocktail party phenomenon and visual selectivity, amongst others.

All faculty, students, and staff campus-wide are encouraged to attend, and all are invited to a reception following the event in the Keck courtyard just outside the lecture hall.

More information can be found about the lecture series and our speakers below, as well as on our website at http://gsa.rice.edu/lecture

Dr. Arthur Gottschalk

Arthur Gottschalk is the chair of the Composition and Theory department in the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. Gottschalk's teaching specialties include electronic music, music theory, music composition, and counterpoint. He is also a lecturer on music and technology, music in film, and music business and law. As a film and television composer he numbers six feature films, twelve television scores, and numerous industrial films and commercials among his credits. His book, Functional Hearing, is published by Scarecrow Press, a division of Rowman & Littlefield.

Dr. James Pomerantz

James Pomerantz is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Rice University. His research focuses on human visual perception with a special emphasis on the perception of form and of structure in visual patterns, Gestalt psychology, and on the role of attention in perceptual organization. He has also published on motion perception, color perception, texture perception, visual imagery, and theoretical approaches to perception. He has taught at numerous universities including Yale, SUNY Buffalo, and Brown, where he also served as the provost from 1995-1998. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Amercan Psychological Society, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

The GSA Cross-Disciplinary Lecture Series:

This lecture series aims to pair top scholars from different departments and schools within Rice to address a common theme or idea for the education of the Rice community at-large. The target audience consists of fellow Rice faculty as well as interested students and postdoctoral researchers. With this design, we hope to fill the gap between the very general memorial lectures and highly-technical department colloquia, neither of which are aimed at a highly-educated, yet diverse audience. By offering more substantial insights to the educated listener, this cross-disciplinary design is intended not only to offer a forum for the community to learn first-hand about some of the cutting-edge work done here at Rice, but to also provide a venue for the sharing of ideas amongst students and faculty alike and to encourage future collaborations.

The structure of the event consists of a 20-minute presentation by each speaker after a short introduction by the GSA representative from the speaker's home department. There will be 5 - 10 minutes for questions following each talk, a brief presentation of a certificate and $100 honorarium for each speaker, and a reception immediately following outside of Valhalla in the interest of sparking interdisciplinary discussion and brainstorming; we will encourage and expect a large attendance from a variety of fields of study. Graduate students wishing to nominate a faculty speaker may email the lecture coordinators Eileen Meyer and Brent Carey at meyer@rice.edu and bcarey@rice.edu, respectively.