A musical Journey: from Signal to Experience

The Department of Humanities and Arts announces a series of musical events
Directed by conductor and pianist Prof. Eitan Globerson

The series is intended for Technion faculty staff שand Students who wish to broaden their musical horizons and foster dialogue within the Technion community on scientific research and technological innovations related to music.

Second meeting: January 7, 2026 | 16:30

From Chaos to Harmony: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
Guest – Jazz pianist and researcher Dr. Dan Cohen [Department of Humanities and Arts].

This is the second in a series of four meetings exploring the foundations of music, featuring live performances of works from the finest repertoire of Western music.

In the first session, we discussed musical hierarchies and the architectural structures that underpin many of the masterpieces of Western music.

In the upcoming event, we will focus on the role of harmony in music — both as a central syntactic tool of the musical language and as a key feature of the personal compositional style of great composers throughout history, from the Middle Ages to the decline of functional harmony in the 20th century.

We will describe the stylistic revolution of the 20th century and explore innovative harmonic languages in Impressionism, Jazz, and other musical languages of the 20th century. We will also highlight the relationship between harmony and the perception of color in the works of synesthetic composers such as Scriabin, as well as his special collaboration with the painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Finally, we will discuss the perceptual abilities involved in processing harmony and present recent research on the neural systems underlying harmonic perception in the brain.

Registration is closed.

Upcoming meetings:

Third meeting: March 25, 2026 | 16:30
Style and Anti-Style: Conformism and Revolution in Music

Fourth meeting: June 1, 2026 | 16:30
Musical Interpretation: From Analysis to Performance