RITMO is now entering its last phase. Many doctoral and postdoctoral fellows are approaching the end of their projects, so there are many analyses to complete, datasets to prepare for archiving, and manuscripts in preparation. At the same time, several new projects have been funded, so the RITMO spirit will continue for several years.
One exciting opportunity of having a centre over many years is the ability to develop long-term collaborations that can be sourced to support various initiatives. We increasingly see how researchers help each other and form new constellations to answer questions they would never have thought of on their own. These conversations are also stimulated by the many guest researchers from near and far. The visitors bring fresh perspectives, innovative ideas, and delicious sweets to share in the kitchen area, adding to the sense of community.
Some examples of the growing interdisciplinarity became prominent when selecting highlights from each cluster. One study, by Fuhrer and colleagues, involved researchers from almost all parts of RITMO and demonstrated that the human brain can implicitly encode structure in random auditory streams. Another study, spearheaded by Leske, was equally interdisciplinary and showed how the brain uses the ?sharpness? of a sound to tune timing and improve beat perception.
We are also thrilled to have received funding for three new projects. SongGesture will explore gesturing and vocal performance across three musical traditions, and GROOVE will delve deep into groove-based rhythms. ChromaSonic set out to develop a platform for evolutionary sound discovery. Several RITMO researchers have also been involved in winning a bid to establish a new, large, national consortium, MishMash Centre for AI and Creativity.?
You can read more about these and many other things in this year's annual report, in rhythm, time, and motion.
Alexander Refsum Jensenius and?Anne Danielsen
Table of Contents
RITMO at a Glance
Rhythm is everywhere, from walking, talking, dancing and playing to telling stories about the past and predicting the future.
Our heartbeat, brain waves, and other bodily cycles work through rhythm. Rhythm is a crucial aspect of human action and perception. Our human rhythm also interacts with the world's cultural, biological, and mechanical rhythms.?
At RITMO,?we research rhythmic phenomena and the complex interplay between the human body and brain. The central idea is to establish a link between features of rhythmic phenomena in the world and within the (embodied) mind. The aim is?to understand?our ability to perceive rhythm and?how this affects our actions and experiences.
RITMO is a highly interdisciplinary centre that combines perspectives and methods from music and media studies, philosophy and aesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, and informatics. Our research employs state-of-the-art methods, including motion capture, neuroimaging, pupillometry, machine learning, and robotics.
Structure & Aesthetics Cluster
We investigate the structure and aesthetics of musical rhythm and time. We are interested in rhythmical experiences and practices and how these can provide insights into perceptual processes, meaning-making, and sociocultural contexts. We examine the role of rhythm, temporal structure, and timing in the experience of music, both in its aesthetic dimension and cognitive processes.
Highlights
- Br?vig and Stevenson have explored the dynamic interplay between human musicianship and machine music through the concept of "machine aesthetics". By examining live performances that mimic machine-generated sounds, they demonstrate how a nuanced understanding of machine aesthetics can enrich our insight into the relationships between musical expression and technology.
- Danielsen, Paulsrud, and London have studied how musical training changes how musicians hear the timing of sounds. The results show that genre-specific experience shapes low-level timing perception and action, revealing a lasting influence of musical background on auditory and sensorimotor processing. Surprisingly, that difference persisted even when the stimuli were spoken rather than sung, suggesting the effect goes beyond musical timbre.
- Polak challenges the view that many scholars acknowledge Africa’s musical variety yet treat African music as largely uniform. He argues that some genres, such as Malian and northern Ghanaian (Dagbamba) drumming, feature uneven beat subdivisions, whereas southern Ghanaian genres (Ewe, Asante) do not. The paper concludes that African rhythmic systems are more diverse than many theories imply, and that research should more consistently recognize that diversity.
- Lartillot et al. developed a visualization strategy to explain the multifaceted beauty of the final Contrapunctus in J.S. Bach's The Art of Fugue. Participants with varied musical expertise and taste were invited to listen to a recorded performance of the piece and watch the visualization on their own computer. A majority reported that the visualization enhanced their musical understanding, and a small group felt it helped them better appreciate the music.
A Comprehensive AI-based System for Advanced Music Analysis
The project?MIRAGE—A Comprehensive AI-Based System for Advanced Music Analysis?(2019-2024) aimed to improve computers' capability to listen to and understand music. Its goal was to develop technologies that facilitate the understanding and appreciation of music by generating rich and detailed descriptions. These encompass various dimensions, such as rhythm, tonality, formal structure, melodic shape, sound colour, and emotions. One main focus was the study of Norwegian Hardanger fiddle music.?The work on designing applications for musicology, music cognition, and the general public is ongoing.
Musical Fragmentation
The project Musical Fragmentation investigates the aesthetics and pleasures of musical rhythms and grooves experienced as fragmented or related to machines. The focus is on sample-based music, cut-and-paste and glitch aesthetics, and other experimental music expressions. The aim is to explore how listeners make meaning from musical fragmentation and machine rhythms, and how these experiences are related to cognitive processes.
Musical Microrhythm
The project TIME: Timing and Sound in Musical Microrhythm investigates interactions between temporal and sound-related features at the micro-level of rhythm in musical genres where rhythm is a core dimension. The aim is to gain new insights into the micro-level of auditory perception and the role of cultural background and/or musical training. This is based on qualitative and quantitative methodologies from musicology, ethnomusicology, music psychology, and motion research.
Multimodal rhythm in music and dance from West Africa
The project DjembeDance – Multimodal rhythm in music and dance from West Africa studies rhythm in djembe drumming and dance from Mali. The aim is to better understand rhythm as a multimodal phenomenon. The collaborative project builds on an extensive dataset of multimedia recordings of live music and dance performance, combining multitrack audio, multi-camera video, and 3D motion-tracking data.
Structure & Cognition Cluster
The goal is to expand our understanding of how rhythm and sense of time are constructed in the human mind. We study the influence of rhythm and time on perception, attention, and effort; imagery and illusions; prediction, and cognitive control processes across sensory modalities.
Highlights
- Fuhrer and colleagues demonstrated that the human brain can encode structure in random auditory streams, even when attention is directed elsewhere. By leveraging high-spatial-resolution intracranial EEG collected from patients undergoing pre-surgical epilepsy evaluation, the team identified a network outside the auditory system, including the hippocampus and frontal regions, that continuously encodes structural information. These findings illuminate the neural substrate supporting the detection of patterns and unexpected events in the environment.
- People’s sense of where a "beat" falls depends on how sharp a sound’s onset is. Leske and colleagues used EEG and probabilistic cues to show that, before a sound occurs, beta?band brain activity (15–25 Hz) reflects predictions about that sharpness. Stronger pre?stimulus beta power predicted better timing judgments and matched independent measures of temporal precision, suggesting the brain uses top?down expectations about acoustic edges to tune neural timing and improve beat perception.
- Laeng and colleagues re-examined a previous finding that people prefer the original version of an artwork to examples where colours have been modified. The new study identifies reduced colour contrast as the likely driver of earlier reported preferences. By manipulating contrast and measuring preference and gaze, they show that it is contrast (not authenticity) that predicts preference. This helps refine interpretations of visual aesthetic judgments.
- In a large study of 2,592 Norwegian twins, Hansen and colleagues found that traits like open-mindedness (especially aesthetic sensitivity), compassion, and emotional reactivity were strong predictors of how strongly someone experiences music. Surprisingly, much of the link between personality and musical sensibility comes from shared genetics rather than upbringing. This points to new research avenues: studying the shared biology could reveal how the brain's affective systems tune us to music.
- RITMO contributed to a large, multilab study including data from 33 labs and 1,200 young adults (musicians and nonmusicians). Participants completed short?term memory tests for musical, verbal, and visuospatial material, as well as measures of intelligence, executive function, personality, music aptitude, and socioeconomic status. The results suggest that musical training yields a large advantage in musical short?term memory, a small advantage for visuospatial memory, and a very small advantage for verbal memory.
Mental Effort
The Mental Effort project investigates the allocation of attentional resources during cognitive tasks. Mental effort can be measured behaviorally, subjectively and physiologically. Our approach focuses on the psychophysiological indices provided by pupillometry and fMRI. We are particularly interested in the inherent rhythmicity of attention, the effort associated with various forms of temporal violations of regularity, and the effort used when processing information in different sensory modalities.
The Neural Basis of Temporal Prediction
A primary goal of The neural basis of temporal prediction project is to understand the neurocognitive basis of predictive processing in the human brain, with particular attention to auditory stimuli and rhythm. We aim to decipher the neural mechanisms involved by using scalp and intracranial EEG, eye tracking and pupillometry concomitantly with cognitive tasks performed by healthy participants and individuals with brain disorders.
Neurophysiological Mechanisms of Human Auditory Predictions
The ability to predict upcoming events is a core feature of human cognition. In a broad sense, predictive processes incorporate knowledge from the past to predict future states of the body and the environment, shaping how we perceive the world. The project AudioPred - Neurophysiological Mechanisms of Human Auditory Predictions: From population- to single neuron recordings utilises the unprecedented temporal and anatomical detail offered by intracranial EEG recordings to uncover how auditory predictive processes are computed in the human brain.
Rhythm as an Individual Ability
Humans have an exceptional ability to perceive and produce rhythm, but rhythmic skills can differ substantially between people. The goal of the project Rhythm as an individual ability (INDRA) is to understand how and why rhythmic capabilities vary. To accomplish this, we investigate the basic cognitive, environmental, and genetic factors that shape rhythmicity. We are developing a test battery to cover various rhythm features, such as meter, beat, and microtiming.
Interaction & Pleasure Cluster
We seek to understand why rhythms make us move and how rhythm facilitates entrainment and interaction. We also explore the affective and social outcomes of musical and rhythmic processes. These phenomena are studied through the experience of absorption in musical performance and perception, music-related effort and skilled action, and the dynamics of music-evoked pleasure and social bonding.
Highlights
- The MusicLab Copenhagen dataset has been released, providing a unique multimodal recording of concert listening and performance, enabling the study of embodied and social dynamics in musical settings. These resources support analyses of physiological synchrony, attention, and collective experience across live and laboratory contexts.
- D’Amario and Jensenius have investigated cardiac coherence between musicians and audiences. This study reports physiological synchrony aligned with orchestral performance, suggesting that ensemble music-making and listening foster bodily coupling. The findings contribute to theories of social entrainment and the embodied basis of collective musical experience.
- Through qualitative phenomenology, H?ffding, Haswell?Martin, and Nielsen characterise absorbed concert listening as an immersive, affectively rich mode of engagement. The study maps how attention, meaning-making, and embodied presence converge in live listening, offering a nuanced account of aesthetic absorption beyond reductive cognitive metrics.
- Upham and Rosas have analysed chest-mounted accelerometer data from audience members at a chamber-music concert to characterise how people move during different parts of a concert. Using exploratory comparisons with self-reports and motion similarity between neighbours and distant attendees (including live-stream viewers), they identify two dominant patterns: subtle "dynamic stilling" and conspicuous tempo-matched bouncing.
Bodies in Concert
Concerts bring audiences and musicians together in time, in place, and in music. Bodies in Concert is a project exploring the movement and physiology of concert participants through various technologies adapted to the study of the musical experience.
Engagement and Absorption
Do time and timing matter for musical engagement and absorption? Music is well known for its ability to engage, yet the nature of this engagement remains elusive. The project Engagement and Absorption explores rhythm, temporality, and meaning in musical engagement, such as listening and performing. The project encompasses various research angles, including musical sense-making and ethics, absorption in musical performance, spatiality and immersion, and social interaction.
Entrainment, Social Bonding and Pleasure
The project Entrainment, Social Bonding and Pleasure aims to advance our understanding of how entrainment, synchronised behaviour, and other related processes lead to prosocial outcomes such as social bonding. The project seeks to explore the role of empathy in interpersonal synchronisation and uncover the factors contributing to synchronous movement and social bonding in concerts. It also explores whether entrained listening can evoke affiliation towards fellow listeners, musicians, or social groups.
Bodily Entrainment to Audiovisual Rhythms
Much focus has been devoted to understanding the "foreground" of human activities, such as the things we say, our actions, and the sounds we hear. The AMBIENT project will study the sonic and visual "background" of indoor environments, such as the sound of a ventilation system in an office, footsteps in a corridor, or people fidgeting in a classroom. The project focuses on how different auditory and visual stimuli combine to create rhythms in various environments and how such rhythms influence people's bodily behaviours and feelings.
Musical Chills
The Musical Chills project investigates the brain processes and musical triggers underlying the intense, pleasurable 'chills' responses that music evokes. It explores the role of other neuromodulators (particularly the endogenous opioid system) and the use of pharmacological agents in the pleasurable response to music. Moreover, the project investigates what specific musical features can trigger chills.
MusicLab: Researching real-life concerts
MusicLab is an innovation project by RITMO and the University Library. The aim is to explore new methods for conducting research, research communication, and education. Each MusicLab event is organised around a concert in a public venue, which is also the study object. The events also contain an edutainment element through panel discussions with world-leading researchers and artists, and "data jockeying" in the form of live data analysis of recorded data.
Interaction & Robotics Cluster
We investigate aspects of rhythm and motion through robotics and technology. This includes creating interactive music systems focusing on multi-dimensional mapping from sensors to musical parameters. Moreover, we design and prototype adaptive robot systems and explore human-robot and robot-robot interactions in collective settings.
Highlights
- Christodoulou and colleagues have developed MusiQAl, a large collection of over 300 music performance videos paired with about 12,000 human-written question–answer pairs. By combining audio and video, it helps machines learn to answer questions about performers, instruments, and the musical performance across cultures. The evaluation shows the potential of developing machine-based models that support multimodal data sources and contextual analyses.
- Otterdijk and colleagues used a TIAGo robot in charades-like tasks and found that people understand a robot's intentions faster and with less mental effort when its speech matches its gestures. Observers relied heavily on the robot's limb movements, suggesting designers should coordinate speech and motion to make social robots easier to read.
- In a theoretical AI article, Riaz and colleagues explore systems that react indirectly to people. This is exemplified by self-playing instruments or reactive sound objects placed in public spaces. While there is currently much focus on direct interaction, the research shows how simple, low-effort interactions can create rich experiences. It argues for designing embodied AI situated in everyday environments.
- Wallace and colleagues explore the challenges involved in making robots dance like humans. This is hard because it requires the robots to have both expressive movement and quick responsiveness. Key challenges remain, notably real-time motion planning, learning from human dancers, and adapting across different robot bodies.
Modelling and Robots
The Modelling and Robots project's core activity is investigating rhythm and motion through the design and construction of models and robots. This has applications to understanding natural processes and the creation of technological systems.
Musical Human-Computer Interaction
The core activity of the project Musical Human-Computer Interaction is to investigate aspects of rhythm and motion through designing and constructing new interfaces for musical human-computer interaction. This includes studying and developing both acoustic instruments and completely digital systems. We are particularly interested in various types of electroacoustic devices that explore the complexity of human motion in musical experience and practice.
Predictive and Intuitive Robot Companion
The project Predictive and Intuitive Robot Companion (PIRC) combines sensing across multiple modalities with learned knowledge to predict outcomes and choose the best actions in robotic systems. The project applies machine learning and robotics expertise and collaborates with researchers in cognitive psychology to leverage recent human prediction models and action decision-making to perception-action loops of intelligent robot assistants.
Integrated technologies for tracking organoid morphogenesis
There is a significant need to develop reliable human organ representations (termed organoids) for drug development, personalised drug testing, and organ transplantations in the long run. Integrated technologies for tracking organoid morphogenesis (ITOM) is a UiO:Life Science convergence environment project focused on advancing imaging technology and data analysis to improve stem cell-derived organ representations.
AUTORHYTHM – the role of autophagy in healthy ageing
Autophagy is the natural degradation of a cell that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components through a regulated mechanism. AUTORHYTHM – the role of autophagy in healthy ageing is a UiO:Life Science convergence environment project studying the recycling system of our cells in time and space to improve people's health and life span.
Platforms
The self-playing guitars are mechatronic/robotic devices that produce sounds utilising the acoustics of a classic guitar body. Each guitar can sense audio and proximity activity and has a battery-powered onboard processing platform. Thus, the devices can be deployed in a decentralised, multi-guitar setup.
The ZRob is a robotic platform for exploring AI-based control of drum playing while exploiting the natural dynamics of the drum membrane and the drumstick.
RITMO in Numbers
Reported Research Results 2025
RITMO's researchers published many scientific articles and book chapters in 2025. They have also?given talks and presentations at several conferences. The Centre's research?results also include several artistic outputs, media contributions, and innovations. You?can see all of?RITMO's results reported in?NVA.
People
A total of 51 people?were employed at RITMO in 2025, 22 women,?1 non-binary and 28 men. We work to achieve gender balance in our recruitments.
The World at RITMO
RITMO is genuinely an international working environment. RITMO scholars come from all over the world: Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Mexico, Norway, Pakistan, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and USA.
RITMO in the World
RITMO has research cooperation with?partners from across the world: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Luxembourg, Mali, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and USA.
RITMO Highlights
Numerous things are always happening at a research-intensive centre of RITMO's size. In 2025, we were particularly proud of two things.
SysMus25
In June, RITMO hosted the 18th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology. This is a unique conference, organised by and for early-career researchers.
Workshop on Music and AI
In March, RITMO welcomed researchers from the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM) at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the MUSAiC project at KTH Royal Institute of Technology for a joint workshop focusing on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and music.
RITMO Stories
A project is always more than what you can read from a project page. Here, some of RITMO's researchers present their own research.
Atilla Vrasdonk is a doctoral fellow at RITMO studying the underlying brain dynamics of flamenco dance, exploring the concepts of improvisation and flow in flamenco dance.
Baptiste Bacot is a postdoctoral researcher at RITMO studying the creative process, the practice, and the performance of electronic music from a musicological perspective
Olgerta Asko is a doctoral fellow at RITMO studying the neural basis of prediction in the human brain, with a particular emphasis on the role of the prefrontal cortex.
Pedro Lucas is a doctoral fellow at RITMO studying technological solutions for human-swarm interactive music systems in multimodal environments based on autonomous agents.
Vinícius Rezende Carvalho is a postdoctoral researcher at RITMO studying the neurophysiological basis of auditory predictive coding in humans, exploring how expectancy and surprise shape our perception, and what might be the neuronal coding and dynamics principles underlying this.
RITMO Seminar Series
The RITMO Seminar Series is a venue for presenting world-leading scholars. Based on our Green@RITMO policy, we usually invite our lecturers to stay for several days to make the most of their visit, including workshops and project group meetings. In 2025, we hosted four scholars. These events are open to the public and live-streamed to attract participants worldwide.
Disputations
We hosted two disputations in 2025. Congratulations to our two new doctors:
Recognition
Sonification Award
RITMO PhD fellow Balint Laczko received the Best Use of Sound award for the project Pixasonics: an image sonification toolbox for Python at the Audio Mostly & ICAD Joint Conference held in June in Coimbra, Portugal.
Best Poster Award
RITMO PhD fellow Balint Laczko also received the Best Poster Award for the paper Image Sonification as Unsupervised Domain Transfer at the 17th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR) in London in November.
Oslo Short Film Festival
UiO film maker Audun Bjerknes' film The Sound of Ventilation was selected for the program at both the Oslo Short Film Festival and Troms? Education Film Festival. The film was made for RITMO's Workshop on the Aesthetics of Ventilation Sound.
IASPM Keynote
Professor Ragnhild Br?vig delivered a keynote lecture at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Conference (IASPM) hosted by Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris in July.
RITMO Behind the Scenes
Research is essential to RITMO, but there is so much more. Here, we give a few glimpses into everyday life and internal events of 2025.
RITMO People
Scientific Advisory Board
The members of RITMO's Scientific Advisory Board are highly acclaimed researchers within their respective fields. The Board is vital to providing feedback on on-going and future research, and its members have been carefully chosen to support the different parts of RITMO.
Board
Management
Postdoctoral Fellows and Researchers
PhD Fellows
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Technical/Administrative Staff
Assistants
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Guest researchers
- Adam Lewartowski, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
- Alejandro Nasimbera, Hospital El Cruce, Argentina
- Birgitte Staugaard Pedersen, Aarhus University, Denmark
- Connor Spiech, Concordia University, Canada
- Dana Swarbrick, University of Jyv?skyl?, MMBB, Finland
- Janeen Loehr, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
- Justin London, Carleton College, United States
- Karolina Finc, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
- Laura Serra Marín, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
- Mattia Rosso, Aarhus University, Denmark
- Patrice Guyot, IMT Mines Alès, France
- Rebecca Simpson-Litke, University of Manitoba, Canada
- Sarah Shaker, University of Padua, Italy
- Sylvie Nozaradan, Institute of Neuroscience of UCLouvain, Belgium
- Vilde Aaslid, University of Rhode Island, United States
A Centre of Excellence in Norway
