Lara Pearson

Happy to announce one PhD and one postdoctoral position at the Rhythm & Brains Lab (PI: Pr. Sylvie Nozaradan), Institute of Neuroscience, UCLouvain, Brussels. Belgium. Connected to the ERC Consolidator Grant HUMAN RHYTHM.
More info attached. Please share!
#hiring #Neuroscience #MusicCognition

🧵 New paper to appear in The Handbook of Linguistics and Multimodality: “Communicating from head to toe”, with @acwiek.bsky.social and @susfuchs.bsky.social 🥰 We review evidence that language is fundamentally physical, shaped by anatomy and biomechanics from your skull to your soles. 🗣️🦵 [1/6]

@escom.bsky.social @unioslo-ritmo.bsky.social

Deadline approaching soon: 28 February!! A postdoctoral research fellowship on gesture-vocalization interactions in three vocal performance traditions, based at the University of Oslo. If you have any questions about the position, please get in touch!

NYAS Publications From birth, respiration constitutes an intrinsic rhythm. We suggest that vocalizations and bodily movements are interactively coordinated with this respiratory rhythm, providing a temporal framework ...

Toward a Fuller Integration of Respiratory Rhythms Into Research on Infant Vocal and Motor Development

From @susfuchs.bsky.social Elina Rubertus, Laura L. Koenig, Aude Noiray

nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Photo of the presenter Maria Constantin

Maria Constantin - Check out the Diamond Open Access Expertise Center's guide "How to flip your journal"

research-portal.uu.nl/ws/portalfil...

How to think about culture in psychology and neuroscience? What about seeing it as a source and product of perceptual plasticity? Such an inspiring journey to co-write this paper with R Polak, A Danielsen, N Jacoby, L Pearson, S Horlor, S Aubinet, J London.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Feedback welcome!

@escom.bsky.social
#musicpsych #musicscience

Research position suitable for a PhD student (or beyond), keen to work with multimodal vocal performance data in beatboxing: jobportal.uni-koeln.de/ausschreibun...

Deadline: 12 January!

Apply here: jobportal.uni-koeln.de/bewerben/2429

Feel free to contact me with questions about the position

Job announcement!

Research Fellow (65% TV-L 13), to work on co-singing gesture in beatboxing, based at the University of Cologne. Application deadline: 12 January, 2026

Feel free to contact me with any questions about the position.

jobportal.uni-koeln.de/ausschreibun...

Postdoctoral research fellowship available, based at the University of Oslo. We’ll be looking at physical interactions between body movement (gesture) and vocalization in song/vocal performance. If you have any questions about the position, please get in touch!

All code and the open dataset are published with the article. We also provide a dynamic dashboard for data exploration: thomasgnuttall.github.io/KarnatakGest...

The approach we take can be applied to any multimodally ensembled signals in both human and nonhuman communication, to determine co-structuring profiles and explore any reduction in degrees of freedom.

Heatmaps showing Spearman's correlation coefficient for each sonic and kinematic feature

As individuals differ in their gesturing styles, we provide a computational approach to characterizing individual vocalists’ unique multimodal vocal-gesture co-structuring profiles.

We find that in vocal performance (South Indian, karnatak singing), vocal motifs that are more alike co-occur with gestures that are more alike, suggesting that gestures are constrained by co-occurring vocal motifs.

Figure showing stages in the analysis pipeline, including motif identification and dynamic time warping

We go beyond looking at stereotypical gesture-motif pairs, and instead base our analyses on a wide range of freely varying vocal motifs (595 in total) and co-occurring hand and head kinematics, from 3D motion capture.

The Co‐Structuring of Gesture‐Vocal Dynamics: An Exploration in Karnatak Music Performance In music performance contexts, vocalists tend to gesture with hand and upper body movements as they sing. But how does this gesturing relate to the sung phrases, and how do singers’ gesturing styles ...

Just published, the co-structuring of gesture-vocal dynamics in vocal performance, with @wimpouw.bsky.social
and Thomas Nuttall. Which dimensions of hand and head gestures co-structure with which vocal modalities, and how does this differ across individuals? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds - Nature Ecology & Evolution Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

EnvisionBOX overview2025 YouTube video by Wim Pouw

www.envisionbox.org has been shortlisted for the Leo Waaijers Open Science price: ukb.nl/en/news/shor...

@babajideowoyele.bsky.social @jamestrujillo.bsky.social @sarkadava.bsky.social @DavideAhmar @acwiek.bsky.social

Amazing Markus Küpper made an animated video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HduI...

Counterpoint: what if studies run in the lab just tell you how behaviour unfolds in that context, because context constitutes part of behaviour? And you aren’t just getting a clean look at the contributions of the organism?

Alright it's here! Where we push back against the exploratory-confirmatory distinction that's become canonized in metascience and talk about what we think exploratory research (including exploratory experimentation and modeling) means and why our view is incompatible with 'unplanned data analyses'.

One thing that has stuck with me from my reading this fall is a point that Jeff Mielke makes in his 2008 book: "linguists often confuse their shared assumptions with linguistic universals." Since I care about features, I thought I should read Jeff's book in more detail. A thread.

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#linguistics

Any European PhDs interested in working with me as a post-doc via the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowships scheme, drop me a line (a.d.wilson@leedsbeckett.ac.uk or on here). Happy to chat topics, with a focus on perceptual learning, affordances, etc (please RT :)

Elon might be bothered by the journalists coming here but the true heads know that a social media ecosystem's health is most clearly signalled by the frequency of arguments about affordances

My 3-month sabbatical has ended! Our first gesture-vocal biomechanics paper got a 100 citations. And... I am slowly getting back on the academic job market.

For this occasion, I have updated my pub page, eg search bar, embedded abstracts, AND multi-pdf downloads! wimpouw.com/publications...

For all the newcomers, here is a starter pack of people to follow on #musicscience, music cognition and related topics.

just comment below if you want to be added!

go.bsky.app/4oZbDpj

#musicskyence

Here is a start for our gesture researcher starter pack! Please let
me know if you would like to be included :) #gesture go.bsky.app/B9S5W94