ABSTRACT

Musical Sense-Making: Enaction, Experience, and Computation broadens the scope of musical sense-making from a disembodied cognitivist approach to an experiential approach. Revolving around the definition of music as a temporal and sounding art, it argues for an interactional and experiential approach that brings together the richness of sensory experience and principles of cognitive economy.

Starting from the major distinction between in-time and outside-of-time processing of the sounds, this volume provides a conceptual and operational framework for dealing with sounds in a real-time listening situation, relying heavily on the theoretical groundings of ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory, and stressing the role of epistemic interactions with the sounds. These interactions are considered from different perspectives, bringing together insights from previous theoretical groundings and more recent empirical research. The author’s findings are framed within the context of the broader field of enactive and embodied cognition, recent action and perception studies, and the emerging field of neurophenomenology and dynamical systems theory.

This volume will particularly appeal to scholars and researchers interested in the intersection between music, philosophy, and/or psychology.

chapter 1|7 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|11 pages

Musical sense-making

Enaction, experience, and computation

chapter 3|22 pages

Sense-making and the enactive approach

chapter 4|26 pages

Musical meaning

Representational-computational versus dynamic-experiential approach

chapter 5|44 pages

Experience and interaction

Ecological, cybernetic, and embodied claims

chapter 6|22 pages

From interaction to sense-making

chapter 8|17 pages

Perspectives and future epistemology

Social cognition, dynamical systems theory, and neurophenomenology