Explaining Musical Imagination (original) (raw)
Related papers
A cognitive concept of musical meaning
Percepta, 2020
Almost two centuries after the publication of Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution to the Revision of Music Aesthetics and the consolidation of the formalist current, its principles are still at the core of understanding musical meaning as an emerging property of musical form. The consolidated creative paradigm of a composer "picking up" music from his imagination and then decoding it into a musical notation to produce a music sheet that will stand for the music itself to be read by a performer that will, in turn, restitute the musical work to its sonic nature still is roughly the norm in the Western world. This paradigm, however, poses several challenges to musical meaning in other musical practices, especially those that mainly employ improvisation. Starting from a different concept of writing, dislodging the musical work from its usual "place" on the music sheet, and going through the notion of experience as the primary human process of knowledge formation, this article proposes a concept of musical meaning as "embodied" in musical experience, determined and conditioned by devices explained by theoretical frameworks from the enactivist cognitive sciences.
Experience and Consciousness: Enhancing the Notion of Musical Understanding 1
Critica, 2009
Disagreeing with Jerrold Levinson's claim that being conscious of broad-span musical form is not essential to understanding music, I will argue that our awareness of musical architecture is significant to achieve comprehension. I will show that the experiential model is not incompatible with the analytic model. My main goal is to show that these two models can be reconciled through the identification of a broader notion of understanding. After accomplishing this reconciliation by means of my new conception, I will close the paper by discussing some reasons to accept an enhancing notion of musical understanding that includes levels and degrees of understanding.
Embodying Theoretical Research in Music Cognition: Four Proposals for Theory-Driven Experimentation
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, 2014
Research in the field of music cognition typically focuses either on low-level, technically oriented approaches or on highly abstract ontological discussions that lack direct grounding in evidence. To bridge this gap, we propose a revision of the ontology underlying such research, from a perspective restricted to the acoustic and individual aspects of music to an embodied, extended, and anti-individualist approach. We explore the application of these ideas to empirical research in a twofold way: by discussing two experiments conducted by our group and by proposing two ideas for further experimentation. One of the conducted experiments tests whether the ability to play an instrument in any of its dimensions has an influence on how a subject listens to music; the other one explores the impact of visual information on the perception of sound as music. We comment on the results obtained and their theoretical significance. Our work shows that it is possible for abstract theorizing and concrete experimentation to go hand in hand in the field of music studies.
Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie [Journal of the German-Speaking Society of Music Theory], 2005
This book delivers what it promises: it is intended as an introductory textbook to the psychology of music with an emphasis on music cognition. The book contains 250 pages of text, text boxes, illustrations, and a comprehensive subject and author index, as well as audio examples which are available via the internet and iTunes. The strength of the book lies in the overall pedagogical thinking that pervades it. Professor Thompson, now in Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), starts each chapter with a clear learning objective and ends with apt suggestions for further reading. More importantly, the structure of the book does not adopt the usual bottom-up approach that starts with acoustics and the description of the auditory system. Instead it covers recent findings and controversial issues as a way to motivate the readers and make them aware of the " hot buttons " in music psychology (e.g. reductionism to neural processes, nativism, and the ecological validity of experiments). The style of writing is extremely clear and the scientific rationale behind each of the methodologies and research designs is lucidly explained. The book provides a balanced overview of the essential topics in music cognition. Not only are the main findings within each topic summarized, but advice is given about the pitfalls lurking within particular studies and explanations. Moreover, Thompson throws into question the causes of these phenomena and some ideas for further reading. For this reason only, Music, Thought, and Feeling provides also food for thought for readers already well-versed in music cognition. The expertise of the author is not only evident in the cogent way he summarizes the critical issues within the field but also in the sheer number of landmark studies that have been conducted by the author and his collaborators. These actually form the core part of the book and their range is truly diverse: from timing the perception of key changes (with Cuddy, 1997), through cross-cultural exploration of emotions and music (with Balkwill, 1999) to the integration of visual aspects of performance to the musical experience (with Graham & Russo, 2005). A total of 80 sound excerpts are available online that have been either created for this book or are shared by various researchers and musicians for this purpose. 29 complete music tracks are available via iTunes, where one can listen to the previews and purchase the songs separately. In sum, the sound examples are a particularly inspiring aspect of the book: They represent a variety of musical styles — from hiphop and rock classics to a group of Calabrian women singing to a child, as well as the usual Shepard and scale illusions — and all are explained in sufficient detail within the pages of the book. Online resources could have been utilized more