It is a truism that those who need no introduction are also those who are the most fun to introduce, and so it is with great pleasure and affection I am happy to introduce Henkjan Honing, professor in Music Cognition at both the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Many of Henkjan’s former and current students and collaborators are here today, but I take little risk in presuming that his work is known to everyone here.

The career path of a researcher in music perception and cognition is never a straight one.  Our curiosity about how humans thinking about, create, make, and enjoy music takes us many places.  And we come to music science from many places.  With Henkjan, I like to think that it all started with a shoe.  Not just any shoe—but a shoe that could tap to the beat of music in real time, based upon an audio input (well, initially I think it was a symbolic input, but in real time!).  Henkjan’s earliest work involved computational approaches to musical time—and with a special interest in “tempo curves that might be harmful”, as well as beat tracking—hence the musical shoe.

From his initial interest in rhythm and timing, Henkjan’s work has covered many, if not most of the subfields of our discipline. Henkjan’s journey through our field is readily evident in his various publications.  Looking just at his refereed journal publications, we see his earliest work appearing in places like Computer Music Journal and the Journal of New Music.  Soon his work appeared in musicology journals Music Theory Online, Empirical Musicology Review, and the Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie.  At about the same time, though, Henkjan’s work also began to appear in Music Perception and JEP:HPP, as he was now hanging out not only with composers and music theorists, but also psychologists.  Sometime in the early oughts he stumbled across an EEG recorder, as well as a developmental psychologist.  His work in cognitive neuroscience appears in Cognition, BBS, and PNAS. And last, but not least, his work in comparative biology, from birds to bonobos started popping up in Phil Trans RS B, Annals of the NYAS, and Frontiers.  But please note the continuity of his work—the orange thread of musicology is woven together with the long green thread of psychology, and the blue thread of cognitive neuroscience.

But the real red thread that runs through all of Henkjan’s work is the simple but profound question “what makes us musical creatures”? It is a simple question that requires a complicated answer—or rather, many answers, many of which Henkjan has explored.  For as the Dutch title of Henkjan’s book says, “Everyone is Musical” (I prefer this title to “Music Cognition—The Basics”). 

One other red thread that runs through Henkjan’s work is his interest in rhythm—from all of the different perspectives I have just recounted.  It was account of that interest in rhythm that I first met Henkjan in the summer of 1994, at the third ICMPC conference in Liege.  There was a heat wave on the continent that summer, and none of the facilities at the University of Liege, where we were meeting had any climate control. There were, however, copious quantities of Belgian beer.  So while I might not remember many of the details of most of the presentations from that conference, I do remember that sessions got quite jolly in the late afternoon.  And I vividly remember Henkjan, as our lasting friendship began that hot summer.

Beyond publications, and Ted talks, and tons of grant money, and of course, wonderful books, Henkjan has been a model member of the music perception and cognition community.

In all his interactions with students, colleagues, and the general public, Henkjan conveys his sense of enthusiasm, curiosity, and wonder at our human capacity for making, understanding, and valuing music.  He is both a warm and wise colleague as well as dear friend to many, many members of the music perception and cognition community, including me.

It is is thus my great pleasure and honor to present Henkjan Honing as one of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award recipients of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.

• As read by Justin London at the 2024 SMPC Meeting