Events

Permanent Seminar - Education, Music and Theatre in Community 

5th March, 18.00-19.30, Escola Superior de Educação, Politécnico do Porto

Sala A106

Zoom https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/91358871116

MUSICONNECT – Music as a connection to self and others

Suvi Saarikallio | University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Abstract

Music has been identified as a resource for youth development and wellbeing. However, more knowledge is needed on the related impact mechanisms. In this talk I will discuss music as a resource for emotion regulation, identity construction, and social bonding. I will argue that the affective-embodied levels of human experience are central to our scientific understanding of music as an affordance for these key areas of youth development. Affective-embodied levels of experience are integral to the state-of-the-art conceptions of human cognition, but they can be difficult to objectively measure. I will introduce some of our recent studies from music psychology, music education, and music therapy as examples of how we have attempted to define and quantify these levels of experience to understand music as a resource for youth development, using methods from digital ethnography to motion capture and psychometric assessment. Many of the example studies are part of my ongoing project MUSICONNECT, which investigates youth ability to connect with self and others in the modern world.

Suvi Saarikallio works as a professor of Music Education and researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain, at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Saarikallio actively publishes in the field of music psychology and acts as the president for the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). She studies music in relation to emotions, identity, social interaction, youth development, and mental health. She is co-editor of the “Handbook of music adolescents, and wellbeing”, and leads an ERC-funded project MUSICONNECT about music in youth.