Making music together requires not only individual skills and musical expertise, but the ability to coordinate one's actions with others. Typically, musicians try to improve their joint performances by practicing together. However, musicians encounter two kinds of obstacles when trying to improve their joint music making skills. One obstacle is the lack of sufficient opportunities for joint rehearsal. The other obstacle is the lack of research-guided exercises that would allow for learning transfer across pieces, partners, and different coordination problems. Based on the results of an ERC Consolidator project investigating the behavioral, cognitive, and neural mechanisms involved in joint action learning, we propose to develop an app that allows musicians at any level of expertise to improve their joint playing skills. Two aspects of the app make it possible to overcome the typical limitations of joint practice: First, with the knowledge gathered during the ERC Consolidator project we will be able to program virtual partners with whom musicians can train their ensemble skills individually outside of resource intensive joint rehearsals. Second, the app will focus on training the ability to flexibly shift between self-other integration and self-other segregation, which is a high-level skill with a large potential to generalize to a wide range of pieces and playing styles. The app will be web-based and freely accessible to a large pool of users. Its effectiveness will be thoroughly tested in the lab and in the field to assess its value for musicians playing in smaller and larger ensembles. As the first app directly training joint music making, TAPTAPP will provide new opportunities for musicians and has the potential to transform music education.

Sensory experiences are a vital aspect of human existence. In everyday life, our senses are flooded with input, constantly picking up multiple unisensory signals at once. In our brain, these incoming signals are either processed separately or integrated into one unitary percept – a process known as "multisensory integration". Intriguingly, this integration process can be affected by the social context people find themselves in, for example such that people perceive certain perceptual illusions more intensely when experiencing them jointly with another person. To date, this effect has been observed on a behavioral level yet it is not clear what happens in the human brain – on a neurophysiological and computational level. Thus, in the proposed research I will investigate the interplay between multisensory and social processes from a neuroscientific perspective. I aim to (1) identify when the social context affects multisensory processing, (2) localize where in the brain the social context affects multisensory processing, and (3) model how the social context affects multisensory processing. To this end, I will conduct experimental studies, using a combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), complemented by a cognitive modeling approach. I will use EEG to address the temporal (when) and fMRI to address the spatial processing dimension (where). To address the third objective (how), I will fit a Bayesian causal inference model to the behavioural data. The overarching goal of my research is to extend the current view on multisensory processing by a social component, thereby contributing to a more holistic account of human perceptual processing.

The past two decades have seen a decline in the liberal world order; states increasingly move away from peaceful negotiation, justice, and human rights. Instead, they rely on an emerging model of authoritarian conflict management, which depends on excessive violence, coercive negotiations, and hierarchical structures of power to suppress internal conflicts. However, recognising that state coercion is crucial, yet not sufficient, to construct and sustain a long-term order, scholars have recently begun to examine the illiberal peacebuilding practices employed by authoritarian regimes to construct and consolidate postwar order. This is an emerging area of inquiry in which many authoritarian practices and their impacts on local communities remain understudied in the academic literature. Focusing on Syria, ILIBRLSYRIA combines cutting-edge empirical strategy with interdisciplinary approaches to investigate the processes and impacts of novel illiberal peacebuilding practices deployed by the regime to control space and society in areas recaptured from defeated rebel forces. ILIBRLSYRIA is structured around three in-depth and interrelated studies, each focusing on one illiberal practice identified through extensive field observation. These include the remobilisation of former rebels, the diversion of international aid, and the stimulation of refugee migration. The theoretical and empirical findings will provide original insights into the realities and complexities of authoritarian postwar governance in contexts often viewed through the simplistic lens of military victory by incumbent regimes. ILIBRLSYRIA is highly relevant for policy circles. It will offer evidence-based knowledge and contribute to ongoing debates focused on developing strategies to counteract and mitigate the impacts of illiberal peacebuilding, particularly at a time when such practices are on the rise worldwide.

Addressing climate change's existential threat demands a global effort to rapidly reduce carbon emissions. However, political gridlock fuelled by societal polarisation can stymie effective action. POLARCLIMATE confronts this challenge, studying interventions to curb climate scepticism and foster consensus. POLARCLIMATE will use a social media lens to advance the current state-of-the-art on climate polarisation, tackling three key research challenges. First, existing studies of climate polarisation fail to consider how passive engagement with climate narratives shape climate opinions. Second, studies of climate polarisation are typically siloed to a single platform, limiting their demographic relevance and preventing a robust cross-platform analysis of content and structure. Finally, studies do not adequately consider the agents who drive climate polarisation, especially those organisations with a vested financial interest in maintaining the status quo. To address these challenges, POLARCLIMATE will take an interdisciplinary, multi-modal approach drawing on quantitative methods from networks and data science, and qualitative methods from climate communications. The analysis of passive consumption and cross-platform structure will be studied using Bayesian inference and network reconstruction methods, and content will be analysed using taxonomies of climate scepticism and computer-aided topic modelling across various climate publics. Finally, organisational financial interests will be identified by using Bloomberg financial data, and compared to the rhetoric of corresponding organisations on social media. POLARCLIMATE will balance scientific rigour with policy relevance. The project's outputs will offer multi-modal evidence to inform the development of concrete policy recommendations aimed at mitigating the adverse impacts of climate polarization. These recommendations aim to contribute to a more unified and effective global response to climate change.

PLURIFONT focuses on the single greatest astronomical bestseller of the eighteenth century: Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), and its Italian, German and English translations as one interconnected case study, to be addressed from a transnational European perspective. I seek to appraise the several versions of the Entretiens over a timespan going from 1686 to circa 1780 as interventions in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural conversations on natural philosophy, while recovering the agency and voices of translators mostly unknown to present historiography. By addressing the wider topic of the production of translations as means of transmission of knowledge in the long eighteenth century, my main purpose is to examine some of the debates on natural philosophy at the core of the Enlightenment period in an innovative way: by reconsidering the traditional approaches employed within the interdisciplinary field of translation studies. My working hypothesis contends that the Entretiens constituted an open, flexible and porous ‘site of knowledge’ that travelled temporally and geographically across Europe, providing fertile ground for its many translators to revise the scientific ideas of the ‘source’ text through a wide range of paratextual devices and to adapt them to the debates of their times. As a result, these translations became conflictual sites of knowledge, conceptually removed from the original work, while remaining the vehicles of heterogeneous scientific discourses usually dismissed by the simplified narratives of ‘progress’ associated with Enlightenment’s historiographies.