Nick's (quite) short bio

Hey Everyone,

My name is Nick (just Nick) Raemaekers, I am 24 years old and I was born in the Netherlands.

I will skip the part were I was born and the first years of mental colonization during the primary- and high school years and head straight onto the last seven years. Directly after I graduated from high school I was not quite sure about what I wanted to do in life, but I didn't feel like traveling or "pissing about", so I started doing Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University in Eindhoven. After one year however, I realized that dealing with these types of issues would make me a very depressed person over time. Moreover -and I guess, more importantly- my interest in (composing) music and philosophy had grown to such extend that the time I spend reading philosophical works and playing various instruments began to take up most of my time.

The following year I mainly worked in a factory and played in a variety of bands, of which I could retrieve one link (http://ongekendtalent.nl/profile/16324?sort=desc&order=Titel). My teacher and mentor during this time and after, I am proud to say, is Joop Wolters (www.myspace.com/joopwolters), an amazing composer and multi-instrumentalist.

After this year, I went on studying Musicology in Utrecht. The main focus of this program, however, was on historiography and theoretical analysis of (Wester Art) music, whilst I was at the time more interested in philosophical and psychological topics related to music. Luckily, I ran into professor Clement who referred me to Roosevelt Academy.

The following three years I studied Psychology, Anthropology and Philosophy (of Religion) with a couple of electives in Neuroscience. Another benefit of RA was that I could combine an academic education with practical courses at the Conservatory of Tilburg (I studied Improvised/Jazz Guitar under the guidance of Peter Mingaars).

I was drawn to Cognitive Science mainly because of its broadness, interdisciplinary characteristics and because of the fact that interesting light can be shed on musical phenomena. During this Master programme I intend to study a variety of topics in the different courses (mostly focusing to Music/Language modeling and a tiny bit of Neuroscience). As for research projects, I am basically open to anything, since I believe that most topics can be related to musical perception in one way or another, but specifically I find sequential learning, implicit learning, and iterated learning models quite fascinating.

After this program I hope that I will be eligible to gain some first-hand research experience in the field of music cognition and perhaps even pursue a PhD in either Cognitive Science (e.g. in San Diego) or Philosohpy of Mind (e.g. at Warwic). If at some point in time I will be allowed to lead my own research it will most likely revolve around music composition and improvisation (creative/generative processes in music).

I hope this wasn't all too boring for you to read ;)

Take care,

Nick