SysMus24

Minna Huotilainen is professor of educational sciences at University of Helsinki. She works as the director of the Changing Education Master's programme and PI at the Centre of Excellence in research on Music, Mind, Body and Brain. She is known for her neuroscientific discoveries in the field of music and learning, identifying fetal musical learning and demonstrating neural benefits of musical play school and instrument lessons. Her passion is to deliver research results to the general public in an understandable form. 

Tuomas Eerola is a Professor in Music Cognition at Durham University. His research combines empirical music research, music psychology, and music and science. The topics of interest are music and emotions, and how we perceive music, especially the central elements such as melody, timbre, rhythm, metre, and dissonance. He approaches these topics with empirical experiments and often uses computational models to articulate the theories. He champions open science in his work. 

Professor Eerola has led several major research projects, Sweet Sorrow funded by the Academy of Finland (2013-2017). He has been the co-investigator in Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, 2016-18), led by Martin Clayton and the other co-investigators being Antonio Camurri (Genoa) and Peter Keller (Sydney). He has also been involved in two funded research projects (EnTimeMent, funded by EU FET programme led by Antonio Camurri, and Social cohesion and resilience through intercultural music engagement, which is funded by Australian Research Council and led by Jane Davidson and Bill Thompson). 

 At Music Department at Durham University, he has served as the Director of Research (2013-2015, 2021-) and the Head of Department (2018-2020). He has also been the President of Finnish Musicological Society and serves on several editorial boards including the journals Psychology of Music and Music Perception.

Dr. Peretz is a professor of Psychology at the University of Montreal and the co-holder of a Casavant Research chair in neurocognition of music. She has published over 470 scientific papers on a variety of topics in neurocognition of music, from perception, memory, and emotions to singing and dancing.
Her research focuses on the musical potential of ordinary people, its neural correlates, its heritability and its specificity relative to language. She is renowned for her work on congenital and acquired musical disorders (amusia) and on the biological foundations of music processing in general. She has shown that musicality can be distinguished from language by mobilizing a specialized brain network, under the likely influence of innate mechanisms. As a result, every individual is born musical. This neurobiological approach to music is based on a thorough and experimental study of cases that have selectively lost musical skills as a result of a stroke or of a congenital anomaly. The approach she uses pertains to cognitive neuropsychology and exploits a variety of techniques, including psychophysics, electroencephalography and magneto-encephalography, anatomical and functional neuroimaging by magnetic resonance, transcranial magnetic stimulation and genetics.
Dr. Peretz has been awarded several prizes: The Justine & Yves Sergent award, the ACFAS Jacques Rousseau award, the Adrien Pinard award, the Neuronal Plasticity prize of the IPSEN Foundation, the prize of Excellence of FRQNT, the Women of distinction YMCA award, the Armand-Frappier Prize and more recently, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.