Memorandum submitted by Eric Clarke (FC
18)
1. I am writing to express my dismay at
the prospect that a measure of "impact" will be a contributing
factor in the proposed REF, and my implacable opposition to such
a development.
2. My own field of research is the psychology
of music, a subject that embraces science and technology, and
the arts and humanities. It has a history of well over 150 years
of "modern" research, and roots that go back to the
writings of Greek antiquity, and in the last three decades has
demonstrated highly significant, and previously unprecedented
growth. Music is significant part of every known human culture,
and has an enormous cultural, economic, and "health and well-being"
significance globally.
3. A number of extremely prominent scientists
(among them Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, Steven Mithen) have
argued that music is as defining of "what it means to be
human" as any other single human accomplishment.
4. The scientific community now has a better
understanding of the nature of this defining human capacity than
at any other time in history, but this has been achieved by means
of patient, careful work, distributed over a wide and extremely
heterogeneous spectrum of scholarly outputs, and in places that
in some cases were overlooked for years or decades. The short
timescale, and crude measures, of so-called "impact"
are completely inappropriate as a proposed means to assess the
importance of that work, and furthermore create artificial incentives
to undertake kinds of research, and styles of publication and
dissemination, that are anathema to serious research and the development
of understanding in the field.
5. Let me illustrate the extremely suspect,
and at times inverse, relationship between scientific importance,
and so-called "impact" in the field of the psychology
of music with two examples from my field. The publication in the
Nature in 1993 of a report by Rauscher, Shaw and Ky (Rauscher,
F, Shaw, G, Ky, K (1993). Music and spatial task performance.
Nature, 365 611) that purported to show an increase in spatial
IQ after listening to a particular work for two pianos by W. A.
Mozart (K. 448) sparked huge press coverage, international exposure,
and in 1998 the announcement by the then governor of the state
of Georgia that more than $100,000 every year would be included
in the state budget to provide the mother of every child born
in the state with a tape or CD of classical music to "make
their children smarter". The apparent "impact"
of this research (in terms of citations, economic consequences,
policy, educational strategy) could hardly be more dramatic. This
is without doubt the single most prominent piece of research in
the psychology of music in terms of "impact" in the
last two decades. And yet, after controversy, claim and counter-claim
(including the claim by Rauscher in 1997—before the announcement
by the governor of Georgia—that the spatial performance
of rats was also increased after listening to the same music by
Mozart—see Rauscher, F H, Robinson, K D, & Jens, J (1997,
June). "Spatial performance as a function of early music
exposure in rats (Rattus norvegicus)"), and eventually more
thoughtful and careful work, this research is now regarded by
almost the whole psychology of music community as deeply flawed,
naive and simplistic, and of negligible research significance.
6. By contrast, the work of Christopher
Longuet-Higgins in the UK, who was in his extraordinary career
a professor of theoretical physics, theoretical chemistry, and
artificial intelligence (and the originator of the term Cognitive
Science), and a Royal Society research professor, made lasting
and hugely significant contributions to research in the psychology
of music which received scant recognition in his own lifetime
(he was eventually honoured with an honorary doctorate in Music
by the University of Sheffield for his contributions to the field
six years before his death), and would have failed even to register
in terms of "impact". His earliest, and arguably foundational
work, is reported in two small-scale but astonishingly far-sighted
papers (4 pages and 9 pages respectively) entitled "Letter
to a musical friend" and "Second letter to a musical
friend" (hardly titles that would attract the attention of
an "impact" search engine!) in the less than internationally
prominent journal (it no longer exists) Music Review in 1962.
These papers, which are still cited nearly 50 years later (see
eg Chew, E (2008)) as the roots of such diverse developments as
theories of tonal cognition, and automatic music retrieval systems,
were of ground-breaking importance at the time, retained their
research importance over four decades, and remain seminal publications
in the field.
7. I urge the research community not to
be misled into believing that so-called "impact" should
have anything to do with the assessment of research.
Eric Clarke
Heather Professor of Music
University of Oxford
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