Les Mercredis de STMS welcomes Marta Matamala Gomez as part of the end of her residency with ISMM team at the Science and Technologies Music and Sound laboratory ( Ircam, CNRS, Sorbonne University and French Ministry of Culture). She will be presenting her latest research.
Abstract:
Communicating walking movement in the Sensorimotor cortex through Movement Sonification: an EEG and Behavioral Research
Body movements, such as walking, can synchronized with both auditory and visual inputs presented within a periodic frequency range, peaking around 2 Hz. The EEG frequency-tagging approach allows to capture the synchronization of beat perception with neural brain oscillations at the beat frequency. In the first part of the seminar, I'm going to show how brain dynamics support rhythmic sensorimotor synchronization when coupling auditory and visual inputs related to walking movement using an EEG frequency-tagging approach in healthy and clinical populations. Then, I'm going to show preliminary results from a clinical case study using movement sonification techniques to improve walking ability in patients with chronic stroke.
Biography:
Marta Matamala-Gomez obtained her PhD in Biomedicine, with the qualification of Cum-laude, specifically in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience, in 2017 at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona (Supervisors: Mel Slater and Maria Victoria Sánchez-Vives). During her PhD, she participated in several European projects to develop effective virtual reality environments and virtual embodiment for neurorehabilitation. At the end of his doctoral period, she moved to Italy, to the University of Pavia as a post-doc, and to the University of Milano-Bicocca, in where she continued investigating the effect of virtual embodiment to improve motor resonance and modulation of body representation in patients with anorexia nervosa and chronic pain. In 2021 she got two post-doctoral fellowships to develop her research project at the University of Barcelona at the Brainvitge Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit under the supervision of Prof. Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells (Beatriu de Pinòs post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Barcelona. Funded by the General Directorate for Research in the Government of Catalonia and managed by AGAUR (current position). Project: “Sounds for walking rehabilitation in patients with stroke: An interactive sound stepping rehabilitation approach”. Later, in 2023 she got 2 years Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual post-doctoral Fellowship (agreement to start March 2024) at the University of Barcelona, co-supervised by Prof. Ana Tajadura-Jimenez and Prof. Frederic Bevilacqua. Project: “SoMoWalk: Communicating walking movement through movement sonification. In the frame of her current research line, she is introducing electroencephalogram techniques to register brain oscillations when delivering audio and visual stimuli related to walking movement. Further, she is leading a clinical study using the interactive movement sonification system in patients with stroke to improve walking ability.