Embodied music cognition
Encyclopedia
Embodied music cognition is a direction within systematic musicology
Systematic musicology
Systematic musicology is an umbrella term, used mainly in Central Europe, for several subdisciplines and paradigms of musicology. These subdisciplines and paradigms tend to address questions about music in general, rather than specific manifestations of music....

 interested in studying the role of the human body in relation to all musical activities.

It considers the human body as the natural mediator between mind (focused on musical intentions, meanings, significations) and physical environment (containing musical sound and other types of energy that affords human action).

Introduction

Given the impact of body movement on musical meaning formation and signification, the musical mind is said to be embodied. Embodiment  assumes that what happens in the mind is depending on properties of the body, such as kinaesthetic properties.
Embodied music cognition tends to see music perception as based on action. For example, many people move when they listen to music. Through movement, it is assumed that people give meaning to music. This type of meaning-formation is corporeal, rather than cerebral because it is understood through the body. This is different from a disembodied approach to music cognition, which sees musical meaning as being based on a perception-based analysis of musical structure. The embodied grounding of music perception is based on a multi-modal encoding of auditory information and on principles that ensure the coupling of perception and action.

During the last decade, research in embodied music cognition
has been strongly motivated by a demand for new tools in view of the interactive possibilities offered by digital media technology.

With the advent of powerful computing tools, and in particular real-time interactive music systems, gradually more attention has been devoted to the role of gesture in music. This musical gestures
Musical gestures
In music, gesture is any movement, either physical or mental . As such "gesture" includes both categories of movements required to produce sound and categories of perceptual moves associated with those gestures. The concept of musical gestures has received much attention in various musicological...

 research has been rather influential in that it puts more emphasis on
sensorimotor feedback and integration, as well as on the coupling
of perception and action. With new sensor technology, gesture-based research has meanwhile become a vast domain of music research, with consequences for the methodological and epistemological foundations of music cognition research.

Method

The scientific apparatus draws upon an empirical and evidence-based methodology, which is based on measurement of sound (via audio-recording), human movement (via video-recording, kinematic recording), human biology (via bioparameter-recording) and semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

 (via questionnaires). Using a scientific apparatus for measurement, statistical analysis and computational modelling, embodied music cognition aims to build up reliable knowledge about the role of the human body in meaning formation.

Applications

Research in embodied music cognition has a strong connection with technology development, more particularly, in fields related to interactive music systems, and music information retrieval. Mediation technology is the technology by which the human body, and consequently also the human mind, can be given an extension in the digital musical domain.

Difference with (disembodied) music cognition

Cartesian
René Descartes
René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...

 dualism had a tremendous impact on cognitive science and in particular also on cognitive musicology. Influenced by Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is a theory of mind and brain of the Berlin School; the operational principle of gestalt psychology is that the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies...

, music cognition
Music cognition
Music cognition is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mental processes that support musical behaviors, including perception, comprehension, memory, attention, and performance...

 research of the last decades of the 20th Century was mainly focusing on the perception of structure, that is, the perception of pitch
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...

, melody
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...

, rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...

, harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...

 and tonality. It considered music perception as a faculty on its own, completely dissociated from musical action. Instead, in studies on embodied musical activity (such as listening and music performance), subjects are invited to actively engage in the signification process. This engagement is articulated by means of corporeal expression which can be measured, analyzed, modelled and related to the musical stimulus. Descartes' idea that mental activity is of a separate order from body movement is refuted and, in fact reversed.

Difference with traditional musicology

The difference with the traditional phenomenological and hermeneutic
approaches to musical meaning formation is that embodied music
cognition has a focus on an empirical and evidence-based methodology, rather than on subjective first-person descriptions. Embodied music cognition aims at giving a full account of the subjective involvement by taking into account the role of the social-cultural context, subjective background (involving gender, age, familiarity with music, degree of music education).

Embodied music cognition adopts a scientific methodology but its aim is not to reduce music to physics, nor to reduce gesture and embodied meaning to the biomechanics of the human body. Instead, embodied music cognition fully recognizes the contribution of all mental and bodily systems including subjective feelings, emotions and coinaesthetic (or body image) awareness.

See also

  • Embodied cognition
    Embodied cognition
    Philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers who study embodied cognition and the embodied mind believe that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. They argue that all aspects of cognition, such as ideas,...

  • Music cognition
    Music cognition
    Music cognition is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mental processes that support musical behaviors, including perception, comprehension, memory, attention, and performance...

  • Musical gesture
  • Music philosophy
  • Music therapy
    Music therapy
    Music therapy is an allied health profession and one of the expressive therapies, consisting of an interpersonal process in which a trained music therapist uses music and all of its facets—physical, emotional, mental, social, aesthetic, and spiritual—to help clients to improve or maintain their...


Further reading

Godøy, Rolf, y Marc Leman, eds. (2010): Musical gestures : sound, movement, and meaning, New York: Routledge.

Leman, Marc (2007): Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

López Cano, Rubén (2003): “Setting the body in music. Gesture, Schemata and Stylistic-Cognitive Types”. International Conference on Music and Gesture University of East Anglia 28-31 August 2003. (available on line)

López Cano, Rubén (2006). “What kind of affordances are musical affordances? A semiotic approach”. Paper presented at L’ascolto musicale: condotte, pratiche, grammatiche. Bologna 23-25 February 2006. (available on line)

López Cano, Rubén (2008). “Che tipo di affordances sono le affordances musicali? Una prospettiva semiotica”. En Daniele Barbieri, Luca Marconi e Francesco Spampinato (eds.). L'ascolto: condotte, pratiche, grammatiche. Lucca: LIM. pp. 43-54.

Reybrouck, Mark. (2001a). “Biological roots of musical epistemology: Functional Cycles, Umwelt, and enactive listening”. Semiotica, 134 (1-4): 599-633.

Reybrouck, Mark. (2001b). "Musical Imagery between Sensory Processing and Ideomotor Simulation". En Musical Imagery, eds. I. Godøy y H.Jörgensen, 117-136, Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger.

Reybrouck, Mark. (2005a). “A Biosemiotic and Ecological Approach to Music Cognition: Event Perception between Auditory Listening and Cognitive Economy”. Axiomathes. An International Journal in Ontology and Cognitive Systems, 15 (2): 229-266.

Reybrouck, Mark. (2005b.) “Body, mind and music: musical semantics between experiential cognition and cognitive economy”. TRANS 9. (available on line)

Zbikowski, Lawrence. (2002): Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford University Press.

External links

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