Pythagoras Graduate School of Music and Sound Research

The Pythagoras Graduate School is funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and the Academy of Finland. It is a collaboration between several Finnish universities where music-related research is conducted. The Pythagoras Graduate School is named after the famous Ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras of Samos, who first hypothesized a link between ratios between numbers and sound frequencies.

The Pythagoras Graduate School provides a forum where doctoral students from different universities and with different backgrounds meet and learn from each other and from their supervisors. The common ground on which research projects are centered is that of musical sound. Different research fields make the School interdisciplinary:

• Musical acoustics and sound processing
• brain research
• music theory
• psychology of music
• media design

The Pythagoras Graduate School has about 4 meetings a year, usually in Jyväskylä, Helsinki or Espoo. The students give presentations on their research, and they get feedback from the other participants in the meeting. A multi-disciplinary forum like this teaches scientific communication skills to cope with audiences with limited and different prior knowledge on their topic. Supervisors provide short tutorial talks on their field. In some meetings, respected researchers from other universities or from abroad are invited to give lectures or short courses. The research topics of the Pythagoras doctoral students vary from computer music and music technology to brain research of music cognition.

The institutions involved are the following:

• University of Jyväskylä, Department of Music (Coordinator)
• TKK Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing
• TKK Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory
• Sibelius Academy, Department of Doctoral Studies in Musical Performance and Research
• Sibelius Academy, Department of Composition and Music Theory
• University of Helsinki, Cognitive Brain Research Unit
• University of Art and Design Helsinki, Media Lab

The aim of the graduate school is to combine the knowledge of Finnish Universities in order to provide the students with interdisciplinary resources with the final goal of understanding human perception of music and to implement computer audio-music processing.

From the technological side, this work serves as a foundation to improve the position of the Finnish audio and music technology industry within the international multimedia market. From the scientific side, the School improves the level of scientific work on music in Finnish academies.