Research
For almost 40 years I have worked at the Department of Psychology of
Radboud University and at the Nijmegen Institute for Information
and Cognition (NICI) from which I formally retired in November 2005.
During those years I taught a few thousand students and was deeply
involved in theoretical and applied research in a number of fields. See
below.
I have been a research fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington
(1978-1979), at the University of California, San Diego and Santa Cruz
(1986-1987). I have taught at the Music school of Northwestern
University (1999), and at the dept. of Psychology, OSU, Columbus (2002).
Currently I am mainly involved in developing models of music
construction based on insights from theoretical and experimental
research in music perception. More
Topics of research
- Speech perception and speech production
- Visual Speech Apparatus. More
The Visual Speech
Apparatus is a system providing visual information and feedback about
various aspects of the acoustics speech signal in the form of computer
games aimed at teaching speech to hearing impaired children.
- Perception of temporal patterns and musical rhythms
The aim of this
research was
to discover the factors that determine the ease or difficulty to
reproduce a
rhythm; or more generally, to discover how a human listener forms a
mental
representation of a temporal pattern. In a series of experiments, it
was shown
that the primary factor determining the accuracy of the reproduction
was not
the complexity of the series of intervals in a pattern, but the ability
of the
listener to detect an underlying metrical structure, consisting of
equidistant
beats, which enables the coding of the temporal configuration of the
elements
in the rhythm. In subsequent research we demonstrated that the
discovery of the
underlying metrical structure mainly relies on the distribution of
(subjective)
accents in the rhythm, and a computational model was developed that
predicts
the most likely metrical structure induced by a rhythmical pattern, as
well as
its induction strength.
- Production of serial motor patterns
- Modeling of tonal music perception. More
- Generation of tonal melodies. More
