Rasmus Høll Nielsen
Ph.D.

 

Center for Semiotics
University of Aarhus

Building 1467
Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7
DK-8000 Aarhus C
DENMARK

 

WORK AND INTERESTS

I have a bachelor's degree in musicology and am currently in the process of finishing my master's degree in cognitive semiotics as a part of my PhD-thesis.

My main areas are music and sound perception, with particular interest in the transmission from acoustic sound to auditory perception and the derived auditory experience. Playing music myself as well as working with music production, I am especially intrigued by the notion of musical expressivity; the often very subtle nuances that make the music “come alive”.

The jargon of musicians and producers sometimes reveal a distinction between music that is performed with a lot of vitality, and musical performances that lack this aspect – and as a result are being described as “lifeless”. Could this way of speech be rooted in an actual perception of “aliveness” in music? This question is the core of my project, yet my approach starts out at the more basic level of sound itself. Still very much at its outset, my first and current task lies in investigating the possibility for the existence of mechanisms that detect animate sources in our sound environment. The project borrows methodology from behavioral research in visual animacy, and on a broader scope relates to research done in psychoacoustics, musical expressivity, music/sound phenomenology and music/sound perception.