Within day of Covid-19 reaching Europe in early 2020, music had emerged as one of the most prominent media for emotional engagement with the effects of lockdown, sickness and grief. Its remarkable primacy for expressing, navigating and shaping emotional pandemic experiences was quickly picked up by researchers and journalists who showed an immediate interest in finding evidence both for the role of music in past pandemics and for continuities across time. It quickly transpired, though, that they lacked established categories, shared methodologies and sufficient historical knowledge to describe and to compare the phenomenon adequately. The study of music in pandemics, and especially of its emotional significance, is both underdeveloped and urgently needed - and has the potential to constitute a major new field of research on music, emotions and pandemics alike. GOING VIRAL will be the first study to provide a comparative history of the imbrication of music in the emotional experiences of pandemics. Its major research aims are - to develop an innovative conceptualisation and methodology for studying music and emotions across history, building on the equally well-regarded approaches "musicking as social practice" and "emotions as embodied practices"; - to generate ground-breaking historical knowledge about music's emotional dimensions in three major pandemics - the Plague, Cholera and Spanish Flu - in Vienna beginning in the 17th century, highlighting both difference and continuity; - to provide a solid conceptual, methodological and historical foundation for comparative studies on music, emotions and pandemics across a vast range of disciplines. GOING VIRAL's results will not only be applicable in related historical settings but also enable a meaningful interdisciplinary discourse with the social and natural sciences about music end emotions in pandemics, including Covid-19.

Objectives and ambition: Substance use disorder (SUD) is associated with a high global burden of disease, with 5.4% of all disability-adjusted life years lost due to alcohol and illicit drugs. Highly prevalent multimorbidity includes polysubstance use, mental health conditions, and other non-communicable and infectious diseases. Where traditional treatments are insufficient alone, music therapy (MT) is highly engaging and improves motivation and craving, but its long-term effects are unknown. Methodology: In a diverse group of people with SUD across a wide range of age, gender, socioeconomic, and cultural background, a parallel 3-arm assessor-blinded pragmatic multinational randomised clinical trial with embedded exploratory trials and mechanistic studies will determine long-term effects of active music groups (AMG) and music listening groups (MLG) versus treatment as usual (TAU) on addiction severity (primary: 1 year), recovery, and other health and socioeconomic outcomes. Embedded trials will examine short-term effects of individual components of TAU combined with AMG or MLG to determine the best combinations of interventions. Experimental studies will examine mechanisms using neuropsychological tests and brain imaging. With 600 participants in 7 countries randomised, the trial has 80% power on the primary outcome. Patient representatives, HTA bodies, and interventionists have been involved from conception and will ensure feasibility and applicability across Europe. Impact: FALCO will reduce disease burden through innovative, effective, and affordable treatment and will strengthen research and innovation expertise. Recommendations from FALCO will inform intervention delivery across Europe and beyond, leading to increased safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, and improved quality of life for people with SUD. Stakeholders will be involved in communicating findings in all European countries and regions and ensuring that findings are effectively implemented.

In the internet era, vast troves of sound recordings and musical scores have become available to virtually anyone, but drawing connections between these two mediums to develop insights about performance style and artistic expression has remained a difficult and time-consuming task. Currently, music scholars rely on general--purpose sound editing tools for annotating musical elements in recordings (such as downbeats, pitch, or note onsets); however, these annotations often must be entered manually, and these tools do not incorporate one vital element needed for analyzing recordings: musical score information. This approach can be labor intensive and inefficient, and limits the scope of the data that can be analyzed. To help address this need, we seek this fellowship to develop PPA, a prototype open--source software tool for annotating and analyzing recorded music performances, bringing innovations from the interdisciplinary Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community to scholars and musicians in the humanities. Provided with a (digital) musical score and a performance of that score, the software will automatically generate meaningful AI--driven annotations about (e.g.) note onsets, dynamics, articulations, or tempo, fully integrated with the score. With an easy--to--use graphical user interface, the software will display and visualize the score, the audio, and the selected annotations in intuitive ways designed to streamline performance analysis. Besides developing the prototype, we propose to conduct use-case studies, gathering evidence to illuminate ways PPA can be used to assist musicology scholarship, and to inform future development of the software.

„Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have the potential to become the next big computing platform, and as we saw with the PC and Smartphone, we expect new markets to be created and existing markets to be disrupted.“ (Understanding the Race for the Next Computing Platform, Goldman Sachs 2016). While its technology is still considered in the early stages of development, it is already mature in the video game area. VR/AR has the potential to change the way we do business, social interactions or education, but its applicability beyond gaming requires further development. An important field of research is the audio part. The importance of sound becomes evident when considering how people orientate themselves in space. Unlike seeing, hearing allows us to perceive instantly from all angles, and plays a leading role in giving us clues where to look at. To support natural orientation in VR/AR, the visual and auditory information has to closely match, as otherwise the illusion is shattered and the experience is not convincing. VRACE aims at providing physically correct and perceptually convincing soundscapes in VR. This goal is pursued through dedicated training of ESRs in all VR-related domains, namely physical modelling, sound propagation, audio rendering and psychoacoustics. Specific research projects involve modelling of sound sources, such as musical instruments, voices, vehicles, colliding objects or environmental sound sources, studying sound propagation in complex interior spaces like concert halls and in outdoor environments such as urban or rural areas and investigating human perception and localisation of sounds. With an estimated revenue of $80bn by 2025 (G&S) the demand for trained VR audio experts will increase rapidly. Besides advancing methodologies in this cutting-edge technology, VRACE will train 15 ESRs who will multiply and spread this knowledge in industry and academia. VRACE thus gives European industry a competitive edge in this global race.