Body, Mind & Music: Musical semantics between experimental cognition and cognitive economy
- Autores: Mark Reybrouck
- Localización: Trans : Transcultural Music Review = Revista Transcultural de Música, ISSN-e 1697-0101, Nº. 9, 2005
- Idioma: español
- Enlaces
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Resumen
This article argues for a processual and experiential approach to dealing with music. Starting from the theoretical writings of James, Dewey and von Uexküll as well as from empirical evidence from current neurobiological research, it introduces an adaptive model of sense-making, relying heavily on the epistemological paradigms of ¿embodied¿ and ¿experiential cognition¿. Central in this approach is an ¿enactive¿ conception of music cognition as the outcome of interactions with the sounds, stressing the role of the cogniser as an actor who constructs and organises his/her knowledge. This involves low-level reactive machinery¿a kind of lock-and-key¿as well as higher-order cognitive mediation that goes beyond mere causality and that allows the music user to ¿cope¿ with the sounds.
Is music something out there? A kind of artefact that is reified or objectified, and that can be dealt with in a static way? Or does it rely on processes which call forth interactions with the sounds? Should we conceive of music users besides the music, and think about music as something which is perceived, conceptualised and enacted upon in order to be meaningful? And if so, what is the role of the body and the mind in this process of sense-making? This paper tries to answer these questions by introducing a theoretical framework that leans heavily on the seminal writings of John Dewey, William James and Jakob von Uexküll, together with empirical evidence from current neurobiological research. Its central focus, however, is on the role of musical experience and the way we make sense of it (see Blacking, 1955, Määttänen, 1993, Reybrouck, 2004b, Westerlund, 2002).
The musical experience is multifaceted: it is crucial in the construction of musical knowledge and points in the direction of a processual approach to dealing with music¿with ¿embodied¿ and ¿experiential cognition¿ as major epistemological paradigms. But what exactly is embodied and experiential cognition? And how are both related to the process of dealing with music? In order to answer these questions, I propose to introduce a general adaptive model of sense-making which is grounded in our biology and our cognitive abilities (Reybrouck, 2005a, 2006b) in an attempt to bring together body, mind and music. There are, in fact, current conceptual developments in cognitive science which argue for the inclusion of the body in our understanding of the mind. As such, it is possible to articulate a plausible and grounded theory which is closely related to theories of cognitive organisation which treat cognition as an activity that is structured by the body which is immersed in an environment that shapes its experience. Or put in other terms: cognition depends upon experiences based in having a body¿with sensorimotor capacities¿that are embedded in an encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, and for a musical analogy: Iyer, 2002 and Saslaw, 1996).
This approach to cognition¿the embodiment hypothesis¿suggests an alternative basis for cognitive processes in general. It understands perception as perceptually guided action (see below), and conceives of sensory and motor processes as being fundamentally inseparable, mutually informative, and structured so as to ground our conceptual systems (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991: 173). It allows the cognisers to explore their environment with their bodies and their senses, correlating multisensory input with bodily experience through elaborate mechanisms of feedback among the sensory and motor apparatus, and with temporary information in the sensory input being matched to motor images of the body in the sensorimotor loop (Todd, 1999).
In this embodied viewpoint, the mind is no longer seen as passively reflective of the outside world, but as an active constructor of its own reality. In particular, cognition and bodily activity intertwine to a high degree in the sense that the fundamental building blocks of cognitive processes are control schemata for motor patterns which arise from perceptual interactions with the environment. This means that the drives for the cognitive system arise from within the system itself, in the form of needs and goals, and not merely from the outer world (Prem, 1996).
