Mark Reybrouck

Musical sense-making and the concept of affordance: an ecosemiotic and experiential approach

This article is interdisciplinary in its claims. Evolving around the ecological concept of affordance, it brings together pragmatics and ecological psychology. Starting from the theoretical writings of Peirce, Dewey and James, the biosemiotic claims of von Uexküll, Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and some empirical evidence from recent neurobiological research, it elaborates on the concepts of experiential and enactive cognition as applied to music. In order to provide an operational description of this approach, it introduces some conceptual tools from the domain of cybernetics with a major focus on the concept of circularity, which links perception to action in a continuous process of sense-making and interaction with the environment. As such, it is closely related to some pragmatic, biosemiotic and ecosemiotic claims which can be subsumed under the general notion of functional significance. An attempt is made to apply this conceptual framework to the process of musical sense-making which involves the realisation of systemic cognition in the context of epistemic interactions that are grounded in our biology and possibilities for adaptive control. Central in this approach is the concept of coping with the environment, or, in musical terms, to perceive the sounding music in terms of what it affords for the consummation of musical behaviour.

Children's graphical notations as representational tools for musical sense-making in a music-listening task

This article tries to answer two related questions: (i) what do children hear while listening to and making sense of music? and (ii) what kind of representational tools can be used to assess this sense-making? To answer these questions, we set up two empirical studies in which 89 children – 8–9-year-olds and 11–12-year-olds (first study) – and 331 children – 8–10-year-olds and 11–13-year-olds, with and without extra music training (second study) – were exposed to a music listening task. The aim of the studies was to get an overall picture of the variety of childrens musical representations by means of their graphical notations, and to investigate the impact of age, formal musical training and the characteristics of the musical fragment on these notations. A major finding of the first study was the emergence of two main categories of notations, namely ‘global’ and ‘differentiated’ notations, with a very strong dominance of global over differentiated ones and a negligible impact of subject and task variables. The second study, in which we presented researcher-generated instead of existing musical fragments, yielded a larger number of differentiated notations, and a considerable impact of age and formal musical education as well as of the musical characteristics on these notations. Both studies were ascertaining studies with the aim to describe and analyse the development of childrens graphical notations under given instructional conditions. To account for some of the limitations of these studies, some additional design-based research is suggested. Extensive findings/exemplars of both studies can be found on the Cambridge University Press website.

Neuroplasticity beyond Sounds: Neural Adaptations Following Long-Term Musical Aesthetic Experiences

Capitalizing from neuroscience knowledge on how individuals are affected by the sound environment, we propose to adopt a cybernetic and ecological point of view on the musical aesthetic experience, which includes subprocesses, such as feature extraction and integration, early affective reactions and motor actions, style mastering and conceptualization, emotion and proprioception, evaluation and preference. In this perspective, the role of the listener/composer/performer is seen as that of an active “agent” coping in highly individual ways with the sounds. The findings concerning the neural adaptations in musicians, following long-term exposure to music, are then reviewed by keeping in mind the distinct subprocesses of a musical aesthetic experience. We conclude that these neural adaptations can be conceived of as the immediate and lifelong interactions with multisensorial stimuli (having a predominant auditory component), which result in lasting changes of the internal state of the “agent”. In a continuous loop, these changes affect, in turn, the subprocesses involved in a musical aesthetic experience, towards the final goal of achieving better perceptual, motor and proprioceptive responses to the immediate demands of the sounding environment. The resulting neural adaptations in musicians closely depend on the duration of the interactions, the starting age, the involvement of attention, the amount of motor practice and the musical genre played.

Gestalt Concepts and Music: Limitations and Possibilities

This paper is concerned with possible applications of Gestalt concepts in relation to music. The concepts are examined as to their limitations and possibilities. We propose a reappraisal of some older insights and an enlargement of the Gestalt concepts from a rather intuitive to an operational approach, arguing strongly for using the methodology of interdisciplinary research, and stressing the importance of the cognitive view of elaboration and processing of musical structure by the listeners mind. This involves a shift from structural description to a functional approach, with special emphasis on musical information processing. Furthermore attention is directed to the specificity of music as a temporal and sounding art, stressing the role of memory and imagination, and the tension between actuality and virtuality in the construction of musical Gestalts.

Using graphical notations to assess children’s experiencing of simple and complex musical fragments

The aim of this study was to analyze children’s graphical notations as external representations of their experiencing when listening to simple sonic stimuli and complex musical fragments. More specifically, we assessed the impact of four factors on children’s notations: age, musical background, complexity of the fragment, and most salient sonic/musical parameter. One hundred and sixteen children — 8—9-year-olds and 11—12-year-olds with and without extra music education — were exposed to six fragments that differed from one another in terms of complexity and the most salient sonic parameter. Their notations were categorized by means of a classification scheme that differentiated between (a) global notations, which represent the fragments in a holistic way, and (b) differentiated notations, which try to capture one or more sonic/ musical parameters in their temporal unfolding. As expected, we found a significant impact of age and music education, with older children and children with extracurricular music education generating more differentiated notations. Furthermore, complex sounding fragments elicited much fewer differentiated notations than simple ones. We also found significant interaction effects between subject and task variables. Finally, we found a correlation between the sophistication level of children’s representations of the simple and complex fragments.

Music as environment: an ecological and biosemiotic approach.

This paper provides an attempt to conceive of music in terms of a sounding environment. Starting from a definition of music as a collection of vibrational events, it introduces the distinction between discrete-symbolic representations as against analog-continuous representations of the sounds. The former makes it possible to conceive of music in terms of a Humboldt system, the latter in terms of an experiential approach. Both approaches, further, are not opposed to each other, but are complementary to some extent. There is, however, a distinction to be drawn between the bottom-up approach to auditory processing of environmental sounds and music, which is continuous and proceeding in real time, as against the top-down approach, which is proceeding at a level of mental representation by applying discrete symbolic labels to vibrational events. The distinction is discussed against the background of phylogenetic and ontogenetic claims, with a major focus on the innate auditory capabilities of the fetus and neonate and the gradual evolution from mere sensory perception of sound to sense-making and musical meaning. The latter, finally, is elaborated on the basis of the operational concepts of affordance and functional tone, thus bringing together some older contributions from ecology and biosemiotics.

Children's Criteria for Representational Adequacy in the Perception of Simple Sonic Stimuli.

This study investigates childrens metarepresentational competence with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessas (2003) work on metarepresentational competence in mathematics and sciences as theoretical and empirical background, it aims to assess childrens criteria for representational adequacy of graphical representations of sonic stimuli, as well as to investigate the impact of various factors, such as age, and musical background of the children and the nature of the sound fragments that were represented on the use of these criteria. Four groups of children (8–9 years olds and 11–12 years olds with and without extra music education) were exposed to three short fragments that were distinct from each other by the saliency of one sonic parameter. For each fragment, the children received six pairs of researcher-generated representations, with the representations of each pair differing from each other in terms of the representational criterion being stressed (either correctness, completeness, parsimony, formality, transparency, or beauty). The children had to choose one of both representations from each pair and explain their choice. Generally speaking, our results confirmed three major findings of diSessa (2002). They revealed (a) indications of metarepresentational competencies among the children, even among the youngest and musically inexperienced ones, (b) age- and education-related differences with respect to their preferences for certain representational features, and (c) great difficulties among children to articulate their metarepresentational competencies. Theoretical, methodological, and educational implications are discussed.

Similarity perception as a cognitive tool for musical sense-making: Deictic and ecological claims

This is a programmatic paper. It elaborates on the concept of similarity as a cognitive tool for sense-making in music. Taking as a starting point the definition of similarity as a relational concept, it tries to provide a description in terms of standard and goal that can be applied to the delimitation of elements as well as to the comparison of these elements with each other. As such it focusses on three major topics: (i) the delimitation of elements, (ii) the comparison of these elements to themselves (self-reference) and to each other, and (iii) an operational framework for the delimitation of these elements. The latter is considered from the position of deixis and ecological perception, relying on the “deictic” act of mental pointing to elements that are eligible for deliberate attention as well as on the “ecological” principles of event perception and cognitive economy. It is possible, further, to conceive of pointing as an internal construction of an external operation, and to consider pointing as a predication process which can be applied to focal points as well as to events with at least some extension through time.

From Sound to Music: An Evolutionary Approach to Musical Semantics

This paper holds an evolutionary approach to musical semantics. Revolving around the nature/nurture dichotomy, it considers the role of the dispositional machinery to respond to sounding stimuli. Conceiving of music as organized sound, it stresses the dynamic tension between music as a collection of vibrational events and their potential of being structured. This structuring, however, is not gratuitous. It depends on levels of processing that rely on evolutionary older levels of reacting to the sounds as well as higher-level functions of the brain, which allow listeners to emancipate themselves from mere acoustic processing of sounds to the level of epistemic interactions with the sounding music. These interactions are partly autonomous and partly constrained, but they all stress the realization of systemic cognition in the context of a living system‘s interactions with the environment. As such, listeners can be conceived as adaptive devices, which can build up new semiotic linkages with the sounding world.

Music and Its Inductive Power: A Psychobiological and Evolutionary Approach to Musical Emotions

The aim of this contribution is to broaden the concept of musical meaning from an abstract and emotionally neutral cognitive representation to an emotion-integrating description that is related to the evolutionary approach to music. Starting from the dispositional machinery for dealing with music as a temporal and sounding phenomenon, musical emotions are considered as adaptive responses to be aroused in human beings as the product of neural structures that are specialized for their processing. A theoretical and empirical background is provided in order to bring together the findings of music and emotion studies and the evolutionary approach to musical meaning. The theoretical grounding elaborates on the transition from referential to affective semantics, the distinction between expression and induction of emotions, and the tension between discrete-digital and analog-continuous processing of the sounds. The empirical background provides evidence from several findings such as infant-directed speech, referential emotive vocalizations and separation calls in lower mammals, the distinction between the acoustic and vehicle mode of sound perception, and the bodily and physiological reactions to the sounds. It is argued, finally, that early affective processing reflects the way emotions make our bodies feel, which in turn reflects on the emotions expressed and decoded. As such there is a dynamic tension between nature and nurture, which is reflected in the nature-nurture-nature cycle of musical sense-making.