From: "Tramo, Mark Jude" <aala>
To:" " aa,
Cc:
Subject: To iMABS Executive Board IRB re: iMABS Musicality Inventory
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:43:57 +0000
Attachments: iMABS_Musicality_Inventoryn IRB.doc; iMABS_Musicalityinventory_-
_Manuscript.doc; iMABS_Musicality_Inventoryn Script.doc;
iMABS Musicality_Inventory.doc; Oldfield_1970.pdf
Dear Bob, Jamie, and Nick,
Would you be so kind as to review the attached expeditiously so we can start collecting
musciality data via phone and our iMABS website?
Because you collectively represent all the key components of an Institutional Review Board
appropriate to review our protocol - i.e., lay, medical, scientific, and musical perspective-
and all of you are members of The Institute's Executive Board, I thought you would form an
optimal IRB committee for this Institute-initiated and -funded project.
My co-authors of this work in progress are fellow Advisory Board member Ingrid Monson, Quincy
Jones Professor of African-American Music here, Kay Shelemay, another ehtnomusicology
professor here, and the two summer interns who have been working on the project for the past
4-6 weeks: Scott Rubin, a junior at U Illinois, and Gabrielle Lochard, a sophomore at
Harvard. All 13 of our summer interns have helped shape the questionnaire in our biweekly lab
meetings.
I'm attaching the classic handedness Inventory (Oldfield 1970) commonly used in Neurology and
Psychology research as an example.
Re: relevance:
In a separate study, we found a high correlation between perceptual acuity for inharmonicity
detection and the number of CDs/mp3's someone owns - suggesting activity-dependent sharpening
of perceptual acuity, presumably via changes in the efficiency and/or number of synapses.
Similarly, we found that the amount of time between experimental measurements and the last
time someone regularly performed music correlated negatively with perceptual acuity -
consistent with a "use it or lose it" mechanism.
Gratefully yours,
Mark
From: Gabrielle Lochard
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 6:21 PM
To: rsfreeman@mail.utexas.edu;
Subject: Letter of Intent for Institutional Review - iMABS Musicality Inventory
Dear Institute Board Members,
Please find attached a letter from Dr. Tramo and me. We are asking you to act as iMABS'
Institutional Review Board and are submitting the attached for your review, revision, and
approval. Please respond to
Thank You,
Gabrielle Lochard
Harvard Class of 2012
EFTA00773163
i1 :
EFTA00773164