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Academic Program

The programme for RPPW20 will appear here at the beginning of April.

To be more eco-friendly, the programme will be electronic-only.

You will be able to access the document here, and there will be QR codes posted around the conference venue to quickly access it!


Keynote Speakers

We are delighted to announce our RPPW20 Keynote speakers!

​The abstracts and talk titles will appear here forthwith, but you can bet on the talks being engaging and thought-provoking!

Anna Fiveash
Dr., ARC DECRA Research Fellow 
​The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development, Western Sydney University

Dr Anna Fiveash is currently an ARC DECRA fellow at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, where she researches connections in the brain between music and language. Previously, she held two postdoctoral positions in the Auditory Cognition and Psychoacoustics team in the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre of the National Centre for Scientific Research in France. In these positions, she collaborated with Professor Barbara Tillmann and Associate Professor Reyna Gordon to investigate rhythm processing in music and language in adults and children with and without developmental language disorders. She completed her PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney under the supervision of Professor Bill Thompson and Professor Genevieve McArthur, where she investigated syntactic processing in music and language, focusing specifically on interference paradigms. She completed her Master’s in Music, Mind, and Technology at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and her Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) at the Australian National University. Anna is interested in syntax, rhythm, and prediction of music and language, with implications for more general cognitive processing, developmental language disorders, and applications to education and speech pathology.

Andrea Ravignani
Professor
Department of Human Neurosciences, Sapienza University of Rome

Andrea Ravignani holds a BSc in Mathematics from La Sapienza University of Rome and Master’s degrees from Université Paris 1 and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He completed his PhD in Biology at the University of Vienna and served as a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He is currently a Professor at Sapienza University of Rome and Honorary Professor at the Center for Music in the Brain (Aarhus University). He explores why humans are musical animals and how our neurocognitive capacities for music evolved. His interdisciplinary team employs various research approaches from neuroscience, ethology, psychology, linguistics, AI, bioacoustics, and primatology. His research focuses on the evolutionary and biological bases of music cognition and vocal sound production, and their roles in the origins of music and speech in humans. He seeks the building blocks of musical abilities by studying behaviors and sounds in both humans and other species, aiming to explain why humans are musical animals. Ultimately, his research addresses fundamental questions about human nature: Are we so different from other animals? Why do we spend so much time listening to and making music when it seems to lack a clear biological function—or does it?

Petri Toiviainen
Professor 
Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain, University of Jyväskylä

Petri Toiviainen received his MSc in theoretical physics in 1987 and his PhD in musicology in 1996, both from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Since 2002, he has held the position of Professor of Music at the University of Jyväskylä. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University and a visiting fellow at Stanford University. From 2008 to 2013, he served as the head of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research, located at the universities of Jyväskylä and Helsinki. In 2014–2018, he held an Academy Professorship granted by the Academy of Finland. Since 2022, he has been leading the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body, and Brain, focusing on interdisciplinary research into music cognition and its links to neurobiology. His research interests include the study of music and movement, music processing in the brain, and music information research. He has utilized motion capture and brain imaging to explore how music influences movement and brain activity. His work integrates empirical research and computational methods to investigate how music engages cognitive, emotional, and motor processes, contributing to the broader field of music cognition research.

Erin Hannon
Professor 
Psychological and Brain Sciences Program, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV)

Erin Hannon is a Professor in the Psychological and Brain Sciences program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Cornell University and was an Assistant Professor at Harvard University before joining UNLV. With 20 years of research in music cognition, her work focuses on the development of musical rhythm perception and enculturation. She investigates how rhythmic perceptual abilities and behaviors develop with age and experience, and how cross-cultural variations in the listener’s musical environment influence these abilities. Additionally, she explores the development of emotional responses to music, such as groove and chills, and how individual differences in musicality relate to language, cognitive abilities, and emotion. Hannon is an expert on the cross-cultural development of music and language perception and cognition. Her research on culture-specific musical abilities has received funding from UNLV, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Department, and the Misophonia Research Fund. Her work has been published in top journals in psychology and developmental science. Beyond her research, she has provided extensive editorial service and held leadership roles at UNLV and in national and international professional organizations, contributing significantly to the field globally and locally.