The art of listening
Humans are musical animals. From lullabies to laments, music accompanies our lives from the cradle to the grave. It is as common as it is remarkable: clapping, dancing or singing take capacities that even our closest relatives may lack. Step inside the musical mind in an evening with concerts and conversations. This evening explores the science of musical listening, in birds, humans and computers, but also the art. Talks and panel discussions are interwoven with live music by Nik Bärtsch and Yuri Honing to let music speak for itself.
What do we listen for in music? To understand how music works, we need to understand how we listen. Decades of research suggest that appreciating music requires a special kind of listening. Something as simple as clapping to the beat requires hearing beats that need not even be played. While virtually all humans are musical in this sense, many species appear to listen differently. Music, it seems, is in the mind of the listener.
Across cultures, music marks the moments that matter most. It can carry profound personal meaning, provide a portal into our emotional lives, and may hold a key to our well-being: musical listening is deeply human. Yet, for over fifty years, musicians have collaborated with machines that create new music. Now that computers are climbing the charts, have we moulded silicon into a new musical listener?
The Art of Listening honours Henkjan Honing on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Amsterdam and his valedictory lecture on 4 December.
Speakers
George E. Lewis is a composer, trombonist and musicologist, and the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. He has been a pioneer of computer music, improvising alongside Voyager, the interactive musical system he created in the 1980s. Lewis has written on the history of experimental music, computer music and improvisation, and how these are entangled with race, gender and decolonisation. Among his many honours are multiple honorary doctorates and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship. He is artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and was a 2025 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his opera The Comet.
Renee Timmers is Professor of Psychology of Music at the University of Sheffield, where she directs the research centre Muses, Mind, Machine. She studies emotional responses to music, expression and communication in performance, and music for health and wellbeing. More recently, Timmers has compared musical experiences across cultures and studied musical engagement among people with dementia and the use of music for sleep. She is a former President of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM).
W. Tecumseh Fitch is Professor of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. He studies the evolution of communication and cognition: the mechanisms that underlie the production and perception of vocalisations in birds and mammals. Fitch’s work on the evolution of language and music has stressed the value of broadly comparative research across animal species. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2025.
Eric Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, where he held the Heather Professorship from 2007 to 2022. In his research, the psychology of music, music theory and musical aesthetics often intersect. He has written on musical meaning, expressive performance, the production and perception of rhythm, and music’s relation to language, consciousness and empathy. Clarke is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of Academia Europaea.
