It’s about 100 degrees outside…or 37 degrees the way most of the world measures it…and I’m trying to do whatever I can to keep cool. The kids are “engrossed” by watching the only thing on our 4 channels…”Look Who’s Talking, Too” (OMG)…and so I thought that it would be a good time to post some more details about my recent trip to Newcastle, NSW for the Australian Socitey of Psychophysiology conference. As with most of my time here in Australia, it was a pleasant mix of science and scenery. Let’s start with the science.
Phrase Boundaries in Speech and Music
There was a poster session on the Saturday night of the conference. I was able to present some work I’ve done with former IU Masters student Jim Cummings. And, as the number of attendees was quite small, the particular bulletin board we selected to hang our posters on was up to us. So, I decided to set up next to Varghese Peter of Macquarie University. He’s working on the impact of prosody in speech and music….something I’ve always been hoping I could get involved in exploring as I think prosody is a big part of the popularity of radio announcers. But, I digress. Let me tell you a little bit about this study. A phrase boundary is a slight pause in speech that helps to create meaning. So, here are the example sentences from Peter’s poster:
When the warriers attacked, the famous city was nearly destroyed.
When the warriors attacked the famous city, it was nearly destroyed.
You got it, the phrase boundary happens where the comma is placed. And, a researcher named Karsten Steinhauer has found is that the brain has a recognizeable reaction when it hears this pause…a stift in positive activation known as the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). This has also been found for rests/pauses in musical structure with trained musicians by a researcher named Thomas Knosche. So, this study was designed to see if the same brain reaction could be found in musically untrained adults. So he played 96 lines of music for 24 people–48 of the lines were “phrased”, meaning they had a rest in the middle of the line indicating the end of a musical subunit., 48 were “unphrased” with no such rest but instead 3 more notes in the 4-note measure. Now, while it was a slightly difficult comparison because the ERP reliably responded with positivities to the 3 extra notes in the unphrased conditions, there did seem to be CPS in response to the rests. Very interesting, especially considering recent work we’ve been doing with orienting responses to silence onsets…which…after all, is what rests are all about. But, really good stuff, and Peter was a very nice guy to talk to.
The University of Newcastle
Newcastle was a hub of steel production for BHP (the world’s largest mining company, I’ve since learned) from 1915 until 1999. But, then the company pulled out and left many without work. Now the port is back to thriving again, I was told by locals, due to the increased amount of coal that gets loaded onto the ships there. I have also learned, while talking to someone at the Fremantle pool yesterday about the trip to Newcastle, that there was a fairly major earthquake there in 1989…and sure enough.
But, I went there to visit the University of Newcastle, which turned out to be a very beautiful campus.
The Commendant’s Bath
Very early on my last morning there, I woke up and head out searching for a geocache close to the one I had found the day before. This particular hunt took me in search of a “bogey hole” which is apparently Australian colloquialism for a natural seaside bath. According to a history page on the location, this was a natural formation in the rock which was later dug even deeper and wider by Major James Thomas Morisset, Commandant of the Newcastle settlement from 1819 to 1822. It was, thereafter, referred to as the Commandant’s Bath. Although I didn’t find this geocache because of the MANY people out for an early-morning run, I did find the bath. It is just amazing…a pool constantly refreshed by the waves coming in and out:
Unbelievable sunrise
Memorial Garden w/ Winding Road en route
Shoreline in the Morning
The Bogey Hole
