Music cognition and the bodily approach: musical instruments as tools for musical semantics
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- This article is about music cognition and the role the body plays in its acquisition.
- This ‘coping behaviour’ involves several kinds of interactions that can be internalised—as in listening and imagery—as well as manifest.
- There is, in fact, a strong connection between action, imagery and perception in the sense that these processes activate some of the same structures in the brain. [60].
- These tools can be natural, but they can be extended by using artificial tools as well.
- A major claim of this article will be that music users use musical instruments as tools for coping with the sound not only at the effector level of playing music, but also at the perceptual level of dealing with the sound.
Setting the Problem: The Inside/Outside and Subjective/Objective
- Dealing with music, however, involves a subjective involvement of the music user as well.
- In what follows, I will try to deliver an operational description of the subjective involvement with music, focusing mainly on some major topics and quoting rather extensively from some seminal writings.
- The subjective/objective distinction, the inside/outside dichotomy, the role of focal adjustment, and the role of transactions at the boundaries, also known as The topics are.
The Subjective/Objective Distinction
- The subjective/objective distinction has been treated extensively in the philosophical writings of Dewey (1958 [1934]) and James (1976 [1912]) who conceived of it as an artificial distinction—of a practical and functional order— rather than an ontological one.
- It reminds us of the basic distinction between the ‘egocentric’ and ‘allocentric world’, and the related distinction between ‘endosomatic’ and ‘exosomatic space’.
- But as a general rule the conditions of the body fade into each other and effect each other, and there is only a little room to maneuver when it comes to reordering them.
- The endosomatic space is chiefly a realm of flux and influence.
- Its chief contents are hanging states rather than fixed objects.
The Role of Focal Adjustment
- The problem of subjectivity is also related to the focal adjustment of the perceiver who chooses appropriate settings for structuring the perceptual field in a specific manner.
- As Langacker (1987, p. 129) puts it: [T]here is an optimal viewing arrangement in which the object being observed stands sharply differentiated from its surroundings, and in a region of perceptual acuity.
- Interactions, as they are commonly defined, are merely mechanical.
- The concept of transaction, on the contrary, implies a more fluid, interpenetrating relationship between objective conditions and subjective experience: once they become related, both of them are essentially changed (Kolb, 1984, p. 36).
Dealing with Music: Towards an Experiential Approach
- . . .Man whittles, carves, sings, dances, gestures, molds, draws and paints.
- The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production.
- The concept of sensory-motor integration is very fruitful: it links the perceptual and effector world by carrying out mappings and coordinations between sensory input and motor output (the term ‘motor’ refers to the broad domain of all that is related to movement).
- The concept is not common knowledge among musicians and musicologists, yet its musical applications are obvious (Reybrouck, 2006).
- Basic in this approach is the ‘organism-environment interaction’ with an epistemic cut between the music user (the organism) and the music (the environment).
Using
- Dealing with music is a process of sense-making and adaptive control if the authors are ready to conceive of music users as adaptive devices who can learn to make new distinctions [64] (expanding their set of observables), to perform new actions on the sounding environment and to carry out new mental operations on the observables (Reybrouck 2005a, 2006).
- As to the sensing function, it is possible to modify or augment the sensors, allowing the device to choose its own perceptual categories and control the types of empirical information it can access.
- Instruments, in this view, do not merely concern the output-oriented musical behaviours , but they can be considered perceptual tools as well.
- It argues, on the contrary, for a dynamic approach to cognition that replaces the robot concept by that of a ‘system’ emphasising immanent activity rather than outer-directed reactivity and allowing the device to make use of several extensions at the interfaces.
- Music users, then, can extend their natural tools for sense-making by carrying out interactions with the sounds, both at a physical level—with one-to-one mappings between the sound-producing actions and the resulting sounds—as well as at a level that conceals this causal relationship by interposing intermediate modifications and manipulations of thesound.
Conclusion and Perspectives
- I have argued for a processual approach to dealing with music.
- It is an approach that stresses the bodily activities—if only at a subliminal level— that are involved in the production and perception of the sounds as well as the role of carrying out interactions with the sounds.
- Starting from the subjective/outside distinction and its topological inside/outside analogies, I have elaborated on the possible interactions that can be located at each level of the cybernetic control system.
- The role of perceptual and effector interfaces is especially important here, both for natural and artificial tools.
- I conceive of them not only in terms of effector tools for producing [68] sounds, but as tools for sense-making as well.
Did you find this useful? Give us your feedback
Citations
79 citations
Cites background from "Music cognition and the bodily appr..."
...Embodied processes like motor coordination, or synchronization, in their regulated coupling, constitute the basis for understanding social interactions, as often pointed out by recent literature on embodied music cognition (Leman, 2007; Maes, Van Dyck, Lesaffre, & Leman, 2014; Novembre & Keller, 2014; Phillips-Silver & Keller, 2012; Reybrouck, 2006)....
[...]
...Indeed, the focus on mental and physiological processes taken autonomously, or seen as only causally related (as in every inputoutput framework) will provide us with unsatisfactory models to account for the complex, embodied dynamicity of musical experience (Clarke, 2005; McGuiness & Overy, 2011; Reybrouck, 2006)....
[...]
...…on mental and physiological processes taken autonomously, or seen as only causally related (as in every inputoutput framework) will provide us with unsatisfactory models to account for the complex, embodied dynamicity of musical experience (Clarke, 2005; McGuiness & Overy, 2011; Reybrouck, 2006)....
[...]
...…in their regulated coupling, constitute the basis for understanding social interactions, as often pointed out by recent literature on embodied music cognition (Leman, 2007; Maes, Van Dyck, Lesaffre, & Leman, 2014; Novembre & Keller, 2014; Phillips-Silver & Keller, 2012; Reybrouck, 2006)....
[...]
64 citations
Cites background from "Music cognition and the bodily appr..."
...…and actions that produce or accompany sound, often referring to the notion of embodied cognition or sensori-motor integration (e.g., Godøy, 2001; Reybrouck, 2001a, 2006) on the one hand (where representations of action are explicitly involved in perception) and metaphorical relationships…...
[...]
59 citations
Cites background from "Music cognition and the bodily appr..."
...This holds true for traditional instruments as well as for the many attempts at finding new sounds out of new materials (Reybrouck 2006b.) The development of playing techniques is also related to the search for sounding materials, with a special focus on the sound-producing actions that can be…...
[...]
...Music, in this view, is not merely a set of structures, but something that has inductive power and that involves mechanisms of sense-making and reactive behaviour that are grounded in our biology and our cognitive abilities (Reybrouck 2005a, 2006a)....
[...]
52 citations
Cites background from "Music cognition and the bodily appr..."
...From this perspective the body plays a central role (both explicitly and covertly) in shaping the way we experience music (Leman 2007; Reybrouck 2006)....
[...]
52 citations
References
203 citations
95 citations
63 citations
"Music cognition and the bodily appr..." refers background or methods in this paper
...The whole process is diagrammed schematically in Figure 2 as a ‘perception-cognition-action loop’ (Cariani, 2001, 2003)....
[...]
...According to Cariani (1991, 2001, 2003) there are three major possibilities: to amplify the possibilities of participatory observation by expanding the perceptual and behavioural repertoire of the system; to adaptively construct sensory and effector tools; and to change the cognitive tools as well....
[...]