O VER THE PAST 25 YEARS OUR UNDERSTANDING of how music interacts with the human mind and brain has grown rapidly, and multimedia technologies have augmented the ways in which we engage with music. In Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, Marc Leman examines how these developments might be unified into something that is simultaneously a theory of music cognition and a blueprint for the music mediation technology of the future. Mediation refers to the mappings between the intentions and desires on the part of active musical participants and the technology that renders the music. The main mediating principle elaborated on in the monograph, which is more intellectual discourse than textbook, is rooted in the belief that musical interactions are socially charged, embodied affairs. Thus, individuals understand music in the same way that they understand others’ intentions during social interaction, and expressive intentions are attributed to music because patterns of sonic energy evoke bodily gestures that are meaningful to an individual due to his or her personal history as an active participant within a cultural environment. The first three chapters contextualize the embodied music cognition approach. In Chapter 1, Leman sets the scene by making clear the challenges that face those who are concerned with how subjective musical experiences are linked to physical sound patterns. Chapter 2 then deals with the diversity of paradigms that are relevant to the business of interdisciplinary music research. Here Leman adeptly identifies relationships between trends in music research, such as the emergence of systematic musicology, and landmark developments in the discipline of psychology, such as the advent of the Gestalt school and cognitivism. He also charts the progress made in the fields of technology, information theory, and computational modeling, with well selected philosophical matter visited along the way. This serves as a historical prelude to the birth of the modern embodied cognition paradigm, which asserts that, “knowledge does not emerge from passive perception, but from the need to act in an environment” (p. 43). In Chapter 3, Leman expands upon this ecological theme with a view toward music mediation technology, developing the premise that mediating technology should exploit the way in which individuals naturally engage themselves with music. The ensuing chapters delve into the details of what embodied music cognition means. Chapters 4 and 5 build a case for why it makes sense to think about engagement with music in terms of corporeal articulations and action-based ontologies, and how these lead to pleasurable experiences with music, whereas Chapters 6 and 7 describe how this type of framework might play itself out in musical instrument and music retrieval technologies. Throughout these chapters, Leman articulates a framework in which performer/music/listener interactions can be structured/mediated. The framework contends with the formidable challenges inherent in mapping between the intentions, actions, and percepts of individuals and very specific musical signals. Ultimately, the problem is one of identifying relationships between semantics and musical structure, and then specifying the technological requirements for accomplishing the translation from one to the other. Leman breaks the problem down into three interacting conceptual levels, which he talks about as first-person, second-person, and third-person descriptions. Thirdperson descriptions are objective representations of the structural features of the music, whereas first-person descriptions are subjectively assigned semantic labels that refer to expressive intentions. According to Leman, previous approaches to understanding music (e.g., traditional musicology) have fixated upon these two levels of description without giving adequate treatment to the “rules” that govern the mapping between objective representations and subjective interpretations. Such rules are needed to achieve his scientific goal of developing a complete theory of music, as well as his practical goal of developing a successful mediation technology. The key to Leman’s solution is the proposal that an understanding of musical intentions requires third-person and first-person descriptions to be linked via second-person descriptions, which are corporeal in nature. At this intermediate level, expressive bodily gestures from an individual’s repertoire of actions are used to describe moving sonic forms in a manner that the individual can interpret based on his or

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/10.1525/mp.2009.26.3.289

Embodied music cognition and mediation technology

In this paper, we present recent and on-going research in the field of embodied music cognition, with a focus on studies conducted at IPEM, the research laboratory in systematic musicology at Ghent University, Belgium. Attention is devoted to encoding/decoding principles underlying musical expressiveness, synchronization and entrainment, and action-based effects on music perception. The discussed empirical findings demonstrate that embodiment is only one component in an interconnected network of sensory, motor, affective, and cognitive systems involved in music perception. Currently, these findings drive embodiment theory towards a more dynamical approach in which the interaction between various internal processes and the external environment are of central importance.

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The Role of Embodiment in the Perception of Music

The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction

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The Routledge companion to embodied music interaction

The numerical wave flume VOFbreak2 for simulation of wave interaction with a rubble mound breakwater is presented. The key innovations are a porous flow model and wave boundary conditions. The porous flow is implemented using a Forchheimer model. At the boundaries waves are generated using a combined wave generation-absorption technique and are absorped using a numerical sponge layer.

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Development of two-dimensional numerical wave flume for wave interaction with rubble mound breakwaters

At the Zeebrugge harbour (Belgium) a cross-section of the N.W.-breakwater has been instrumented for the study of physical processes related to the behaviour of a prototype rubble mound breakwater in random wave conditions. Within the EC MAST programme (project MAS02-CT92-0023) this monitoring system has been reengineered and extended to a high-quality full scale data acquisition centre (Troch et al., 1995). The development of the prototype monitoring system to a world-wide unique system with respect to the infrastructure available at Zeebrugge, the instrumentation installed on site, and the data management developed, is briefly summarised. Filed measurements of wave attack in front of the breakwater, and pore pressure response inside the breakwater core, have been analysed in order to determine the hydraulic response of the full scale breakwater. Analysis results on wave run-up/run-down measurements, phreatic set-up calculations, and pore pressure wave attenuation are presented here in more detail.

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Full scale measurements of wave attenuation inside a rubble mound breakwater

Embodied music cognition stresses the role of the human body as mediator for the encoding and decoding of musical expression. In this paper, we set up a low dimensional functional model that accounts for 70% of the variability in the expressive body movement responses to music. With the functional principal component analysis, we modeled individual body movements as a linear combination of a group average and a number of eigenfunctions. The group average and the eigenfunctions are common to all subjects and make up what we call the commonalities. An individual performance is then characterized by a set of scores (the individualities), one score per eigenfunction. The model is based on experimental data which finds high levels of coherence/consistency between participants when grouped according to musical education. This shows an ontogenetic effect. Participants without formal musical education focus on the torso for the expression of basic musical structure (tempo). Musically trained participants decode additional structural elements in the music and focus on body parts having more degrees of freedom (such as the hands). Our results confirm earlier studies that different body parts move differently along with the music.

Jean Pierre Martens

Papers

Full scale measurements of wave attenuation inside a rubble mound breakwater

Expressive Body Movement Responses to Music Are Coherent, Consistent, and Low Dimensional