Arild Stenberg, PhD in Music Psychology (University of Cambridge), was a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles from 2020 to 2022. He has now returned to the University of Cambridge as a Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Music and is currently working on the project “Score Design for Music Reading: Cognitive and Artistic Perspectives”.

Led by Professor Ian Cross (Centre for Music and Science) and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, this project “has several strands, one of which will investigate ways of making musical notation easier to read at sight. Preliminary results (Stenberg & Cross, 2019) have already shown that it is possible to achieve this by means of simple yet effective modifications to standard notation, and these results will be followed up in a series of experiments using standard behavioural methods as well as eye-tracking. The project will also evaluate how musicians interact with and use scores in practice, showing performers how they can reconfigure scores so as to reflect, and to help transmit, their own interpretations of the music”.

In an article written for our website, Arild Stenberg traces the origin of the project and the essential contribution of his host promoter at ULB, Professor Régine Kolinsky (Faculty of Psychological Sciences and Education), and explains how the project will help strengthen the links between the University of Cambridge and the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles. The Foundation would like to congratulate him on this new chapter of his research career and to thank him for this presentation.

Read the article by Arild Stenberg