The Society
ESCOM is an international non-profit society promoting, theoretical, experimental and applied research in the cognitive sciences of music.
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ESCOM actively promotes collaboration among arts, humanities and sciences in music research.
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1991 - ESCOM is founded. ESCOM has become the leading European representative of scientific approaches to music, including natural, social and formal sciences.
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1997 - The Society has published the journal MUSICAE SCIENTIAE since 1997. Since 2011, the journal has been published by SAGE, assuring a wide distribution and excellent online accessibility.
MUSICAE SCIENTIAE
The journal includes empirical, theoretical and critical articles that address how music is perceived, represented and generated from diverse viewpoints, including empirical musicology, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, music education, artificial intelligence, music theory, and music performance.
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Specific topics include the development psychology of music, musical creativity, similarity perception and modelling, music and evolution, music as emotion regulation, singing skills and the perception of structure and form.
Conferences
ESCOM organizes a major international conference every three years; every six years, this conference is combined with the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC). The Society also regularly organises or supports smaller conferences, symposia, seminars, educational programs, and summer schools.
2010 - ESCOM started editing a series of “Classic European Music Science Monographs”: English translations of seminal historic European treatises in the area of systematic musicology. Translations are funded by the “Irène Deliège Translation Fund”. The first volume in the series, Carl Stumpf's “The Origins of Music,” appeared in 2012.
How We Are Funded
ESCOM is entirely funded by membership fees and sales of the journal. The society depends on the goodwill and support of all researchers in the area of music cognition to enable it to promote the discipline and continue its diverse activities. For this reason, researchers at all stages of their careers are encouraged to become members.
Categories of membership are Full Member, Student Member, Sustaining Member and Honorary Member. The main benefits of membership are the journal, the satisfaction of belonging to an international community with a common goal, and being seen to support the ESCOM project by colleagues, and potential partners and employers. ESCOM also regularly sends information about coming events to members by email.