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Participatory Sense-Making in Joint Musical Practice

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Abstract

Drawing from recent embodied and enactive frameworks in the cognitive sciences, in this chapter we explore musical interactivity as a form of 'participatory sense-making'. In providing conceptual grounding, we adopt the notion of 'mutual incorporation' inspired by the phenomenological tradition, and argue that joint musical practice is best understood when considering performers as autonomous and interactive agents who negotiate in real-time their emotional, sensorimotor, and communicative skills. Finally, we put forward some hypotheses for future research through a dynamic systems approach.
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Participatory sense-making in joint musical practice
Andrea Schiavio1,2 & Hanne De Jaegher 3,4
Abstract
Drawing from recent embodied and enactive frameworks in the cognitive sciences, in this chapter we explore
musical interactivity as a form of ‘participatory sense-making’. In providing conceptual grounding, we adopt
the notion of ‘mutual incorporation’ inspired by the phenomenological tradition, and argue that joint musical
practice is best understood when considering performers as autonomous and interactive agents who negotiate
in real-time their emotional, sensorimotor, and communicative skills. Finally, we put forward some
hypotheses for future research through a dynamic systems approach.
1. Introduction
In this chapter we explore musical interactivity as a form of ‘participatory sense-making’ (De Jaegher &
Di Paolo, 2007). This concept is associated with emerging embodied approaches to cognition, which pose a
growing challenge to the information-processing or ‘cognitivist’ models that have traditionally (and often
tacitly) directed research and theory in psychology and cognitive science (see Clark, 1997). According to the
latter framework, cognition is understood as an input-output schema where strict separations are posed
between an objective reality ‘out there’ and the ‘inner’ skull-bound mechanisms that process representations
of that outer world. However, locating cognition ‘in the head’ may play down the active role of the situated
living body in meaning- and world-making, and tends to portray the cognizer as a disembodied,
decontextualized, and anonymous ‘spectator’ in both individual and collective tasks (Varela, Thompson, &
Rosch, 1991).
In response to such concerns, the embodied approach understands mental processes not simply as ‘in the
head i.e. in terms of mechanisms, computations, representations but rather as fundamentally integrated
with the body of the cognizer in different ways (Thompson, 2007). Researchers have put forward a number
of different interpretations to explain how this could be so (Gallagher, 2011). For example, advocates of a
‘sensorimotor’ approach maintain that what truly matters for cognitive processes is the mastery of certain
concrete abilities that allow the animal to interact with the world (O’Regan & Nöe, 2001). Others have
adopted a more ‘enactive’ interpretation, which considers the living body not only as the primary source of
significance for our being-in-the-world, but also as a truly autonomous cognitive system in its own right
(Varela, 1979). Here the origins of ‘mind’ are to be found in the embodied processes through which an
organism maintains itself through constant adaptive interactivity with the environment - where the body’s
biological structure determines the regulation and control of the homeostatic needs of the cognizer, who
continually strives to maintain a stable relationship with its niche through affectively motivated forms of
action-as-perception (Stewart, Gapenne, & Di Paolo, 2010). In other words, the body’s metabolic,
homeostatic, neurologic, immune, and thermodynamic systems allow the living self-organising creature to
interact with the world in a way that is meaningful in terms of its being-in-the-world: because the system’s
1 Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Lab, School of Music, The Ohio State University, USA
2 Music Mind Machine in Sheffield, Department of Music, The University of Sheffield, UK
3 IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque
Country, Spain
4 Centre for Cognitive Science, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, UK.
This is a pre-print document - please do not quote or cite this version!
This is a book chapter forthcoming in Lesaffre, M., Leman, M., & Maes, P.J. (Eds) The
Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction
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autonomous existence depends on maintaining metabolic stability under shifting worldly conditions, both
bodily and environmental factors participate in driving cognitive processes in a recursive interplay (Di Paolo,
2009). This means that whilst being an autonomous system, the body is also deeply intermixed with its niche
as central aspect of the cognitive system’s being-in-the-world. The relational domain of cognition is thus not
reducible to structures ‘inside the head’ but is rather constituted by the active interplay between living
system and its environment, which are understood to be co-emergent (Chemero, 2009).
It should be noted here that this enactive view of embodied cognition, as originally put forward by Varela
and colleagues (1991) and then developed by a number of other authors (e.g. Colombetti, 2014; Thompson,
2007; Hutto & Myin, 2013), contrasts with positions such as ‘extended functionalism’ for example, which
sees the body as a tool that mental operations can be offloaded onto, without offering a truly
phenomenological and autonomous account of it (see Wheeler, 2010). Indeed, from the enactive perspective,
a living, phenomenological, body is not merely an objective piece of the world that helps us perform
particular perceptual or cognitive tasks, nor can it simply be understood as a mediating category that
separates de facto the realm of inner subjectivity from the world ‘out there’. Rather, it is the fundamental
source of experience open to the social and physical environment, a flexible entity that participates
adaptively in the world (Kyselo, 2014).
Embodied approaches to the study of human musicality, especially in relation to human ontogenesis,
well-being, and how we make sense of the social and cultural environments we inhabit, emerged in recent
years from a variety of perspectives (Leman, 2007; Reybrouck, 2005; Schiavio & Altenmüller, 2015). In
particular, a growing number of empirical studies have provided evidence in support of an embodied
interpretation of musical experience (Broughton & Stevens, 2009; Leman, Desmet, Styns, Van Noorden, &
Moelants, 2009; Toiviainen, Luck, & Thompson, 2010). This work is exceptional in highlighting the role of
the body for music performance, emotion, and perception (Keller, 2014; Maes, Leman, Palmer, &
Wanderley, 2014a; Maes, Van Dyck, Lesaffre, & Leman, 2014b). However, it is from a more explicitly
enactive perspective that we would like to discuss the concept of ‘participatory sense-making’ in the
following sections (De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007). This concept, situated within an enactive and
phenomenological framework (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008; Hanna & Maiese, 2009), may help us better
comprehend the complex dynamics in play when musicians interact and cooperate to achieve a musical task
(Schiavio, 2014, Moran, this volume; 2014a; 2014b). Indeed, operating from this perspective will allow us to
highlight the concrete patterns of sensorimotor, emotional, and communicative interaction among musical
subjects, and provide an alternative to what can be named the ‘spectatorial stance’. The latter, it may be
argued, reflects a common perspective in cognitive science based on the assumption that the individual ‘unit’
is sufficient to explain interaction (Reddy & Uithol, 2015). In musical research, for example, studies framed
within so-called simulation theory may consider musical interactivity as a matter of the individual - as the
single individual can simulate internally the actions performed by the other performer(s) and respond
accordingly - rather than of the interaction itself (e.g. Keller, Knoblich, & Repp, 2007; Schiavio et al., 2014)
With this in mind, we also contrast this traditional view with the phenomenological approach of ‘mutual
incorporation’ which describes the way in which two or more (musical) subjects form a common
intercorporality when acting together (see Fuchs & De Jaegher, 2009). The remainder of the chapter will be
structured as follows: in the next section we introduce the notions of ‘participatory sense-making’ and
‘mutual incorporation’ in the context of the embodied and enactive frameworks considered above. We then
explore these two concepts through the lenses of musical agency and interactivity. To conclude we discuss
the main implications emerging within the broader context of musical research, and make predictions for
further empirical corroborations.
2. Embodiment, Participation, Incorporation
Embodied and enactive approaches to cognition ask us to rethink the relationship between brain, body,
and world (Wilson, 2002). They help us reconsider the meaning of body by emphasising its dynamical and
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self-determining properties, and to re-define the ‘world’ not as a given category ‘out there’, but rather as an
affordative structure, which has certain values and meanings depending on the adaptive complexity of the
cognizer who interacts with it (Colombetti, 2014). In doing so, such frameworks do not identify ‘brain’ with
‘cognition’ or ‘experience’ because extra-neural (environmental and bodily) factors are co-constitutive in
driving mental processes (Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2012). This implies that there is a primacy of bodily-based
skills over high-level mental faculties to understand how living beings participate in the changing dynamics
of the world (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2008). Indeed, by adaptively developing its network of flexible self-
generated properties and actions in relevant ways, the animal is able to maintain its own organization under
precarious conditions (Varela et al., 1991). This idea is also known as ‘autonomy’, as the living system
generates everything needed to stabilise its engagement with the world. But since these properties are self-
regulated by the constant interaction of the system’s neural and extra-neural sub-networks, it is argued that
the cognizer is also a ‘sense-maker’; that is, the creature must self-generate its own goals, significance, and
meanings as it actively seeks out and develops the affordances of the environment (Thompson, 2007). In
other words ‘sense-making’ defines cognition for enactivists because it accounts for the meaningful ways in
which the living being interacts with the world. In the social domain, these enactive sense-making processes
are explored in the study of interaction (e.g. van Alphen, 2014; Bourbousson, R'Kiouak, & Eccles, 2015),
which represents a growing area of research across diverse fields such as development (e.g. Reddy, 2003;
2008), neuroscience (e.g. Favela, 2014; Kiverstein & Miller, 2015), pathology and therapy (Koch and
Fischman, 2011; Behrends, Müller, & Dziobek 2012; Samaritter & Payne 2013; Øberg, Normann, &
Gallagher, 2015), philosophy of mind (e.g. Gallagher, 2008; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007), and music (e.g.
Correia, Tahiroǧlu, & Espada, 2013; Moran, 2014a; 2014b).
2.1 Sharing musical worlds of meaning
In social contexts, ‘sense-making’ is ‘participatory’ because social dynamics such as coordination and
interaction may affect individual sense-making (De Jaegher, 2009). This can be seen, for example, in
interactions between infants and primary caregivers - where infants are not passive responders, but actively
participate in the development of shared forms of communication and meaning-making through bodily and
facial gestures and (proto-musical) utterances (Fantasia, De Jaegher, & Fasulo, 2014). In such primordial
social coordinations, meanings and intentions are not pre-given but rather are “shaped and adjusted as the
interaction unfolds” (Fantasia et al., 2014, p.6). With this in mind, we argue that because skilled coordination
is a fundamental part of making music together, musicians (and audience), as a coupled system, participate
in, and thus can form and transform each other’s sense-making, enacting unique shared worlds of meaning.
Think of two musicians playing together: how is it possible to study, model, and understand their ability
to anticipate, complement, and participate in the other’s musicking? The theory of participatory sense-
making sees the musicians as interactors, who are first and foremost highly plastic systems (De Jaegher & Di
Paolo, 2007; Gallagher, Hutto, Slaby, & Cole, 2013; Kelso, 1995) who negotiate the often-contingent
patterns of goal-directed actions to be employed in a musical performance without inferential mediation. By
this light, the phenomenological character of playing together cannot be studied through a stimulus-response
perspective, nor though a ‘sender-receiver’ framework, because its very nature requires that the coupling
among musicians becomes self-sustaining (Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2012).
Put simply, the relational nature of musical experience is made explicit by the concrete adaptive activities
of the living bodies embedded in the musical environments they co-create in the performance (Schiavio,
2014). Shared musical practices, in this sense, are not fully based in mental processes and behavioural
outputs established before the interaction. No matter how many times a trio or a duo rehearses, no matter
how much its members practice individually, a collective performance will always entail a different
phenomenology - one based on shared agency, shared intentionality and contingently negotiated coupling in
that unique context. This is not to say that prior rehearsals do not count in the developing of a musical
performance. The set of skills acquired through individual practice and rehearsal constitute a repertoire of
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acts, a set of possibilities that must be ‘enacted’ or ‘brought forth’ in light of the affordative demands of the
music that is co-created - in and through our actions, emotions, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, we
participate in the way other creatures make sense of the world, but also depend reciprocally on the others’
sense-making as well (for examples, see Laroche and Kaddouch, 2014). In this way, the dynamical nature of
sense-making may reveal the ‘musical object’ not as a fixed, and wholly pre-given structure, but rather as an
emergent phenomenon that develops through shared active involvement in the musical event - the musical
object is, by this light, an ongoing ‘open’ structure that shapes and is shaped by the sense-makers in a
‘circular’ fashion. This is true not only when considering musicians playing jointly, but also when a musical
performance involves an audience (Krueger, 2014a; Geeves, McIlwain, & Sutton, 2016). Indeed, because
interactivity is not a property of a single individual who ‘reads the mind’ of the other and ‘responds’
accordingly, there can be musical interactions before explicit communicative processes are achieved (De
Jaegher & Froese, 2009; Schiavio, 2012). In other words, musical experience cannot be reduced to a causal
process that resembles the classic categorisation of the mind as a problem-solving device - one that perceives
the musical event, elaborates a specific mental state (creating a musical mental representation), and produces
an appropriate behavioural output. Although nowadays few researchers in music explicitly maintain such a
view, it may be argued that leftovers of this position are still tacitly posited when describing collective music
making through an input-output schema (see Schiavio & Høffding, 2015 for discussion). Instead, we argue
that musical communication is realized in the cooperative generation and transformation of musical
meaning; it depends on the embodied participation of everyone involved in realizing the collective musical
event and is thus best described in non-linear, dynamical, and phenomenological terms.
2.2 Enacting intersubjective corporeality
From a phenomenological perspective, the way in which musicians play together may be best understood
as ‘mutual incorporation’ (Fuchs & De Jaegher, 2009). The process of participatory sense-making is always
a matter of gestures, expressions, speeches, and concrete actions, which allows for one individual to be
integrated in the body schema of the other in a non-trivial way - as a dynamical source of significance that
integrates and complements the subject’s original ‘point of view’ of the world.
To simplify things, we might first consider the notion of ‘incorporation’ where a musical instrument -
rather than an embodied agent - is involved. For example, Nijs, Lesaffre, & Leman (2013; see also, Nijs, this
volume) describe musician-instrument interactions in terms of transparency and incorporation. That is, when
playing a musical instrument, an agent incorporates it into her cognitive system rather than simply ‘using’ it
as an occurrent object. Consider Merleau-Ponty’s famous example of the blind man using a cane. As the
cane becomes a transparent tool, incorporated into the agent’s body image like an “extension of the bodily
synthesis” (1945 [1962], p. 153), the blind man becomes able to ‘see’ through his cane by interpreting the
data of the world without any inferential mediation (i.e. without measuring the cane in order to understand
the distance of an object or feeling the pressure on his hand when the stick hits an object). Similarly, musical
instruments may become transparent tools during performances (see also Heidegger, 1927). Here, Merleau-
Ponty’s analysis of the organist is illuminating. Like the blind man, the organist explores a new instrument
without analysing the instrument in a disembodied way. He does not prepare a plan, or develop abstract
cognitive representations of the registers and the pedals (ibid.). Indeed, during the rehearsal or during a
concert, the keys, the registers and the pedals are not simply located in an objective space. Rather, they
become a horizon of musically-directed motor possibilities, and are therefore intermixed with the musician’s
physiology and the musical environment in constitution.
These insights resonate with the idea of ‘transparency constraint’ proposed by Thompson and Stapleton:
“for anything external to the body’s boundary to count as part of the cognitive system it must function
transparently in the body’s sense-making interactions with the environment” (2009, p. 29). In joint musical
practices, sense-making is always participatory in a strong sense, because both the ‘object’ (the musical
piece) and the dynamical process shaping it (playing together) are possible only through the systematic and
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recursive influence of each individual on another. Thus, like the relationship between musicians and their
instruments (i.e. as ready-to-hand equipment), the relationship between musical participants can be seen as
enmeshed, where the horizon of possibility is constituted by their embodied interactivity - the common inter-
corporeality ‘lives’ in the music and in the embodied interactivity that constitutes it. It is a dynamical process
that shapes and is shaped by the music, the musicians (with all their sense-making activities), and the
audience (with all their sense-making activities) (Geeves & Sutton, 2014; Krueger, 2014b; 2014c). To repeat,
music in intersubjective contexts is never ‘fully constituted’ it is not ‘given’. Rather, it is always shaping
and being shaped, through time, space, and interactive dynamics - all these elements are coupled together in
musical perceptual experience. Interestingly, from a neuroscientific point of view, the dynamics of actions
present in the musical feedback have been shown to occur pre-attentively, further highlighting the active role
played by the body - over reflective awareness - in constituting musical experience (Lahav, Salztman, &
Schlaug, 2007; Overy & Molnar-Szacaks, 2009; Schiavio, Menin, & Matyja 2014).
Taken together, ‘participatory sense-making’ and ‘mutual incorporation’ point to a theoretical framework
in which the coupling of interactors though participatory sense-making constitutes new intersubjective bio-
cognitive organizations. By this view, the creative, transforming, and shared forms of embodied world-
making that characterize living musical interactions display a bidirectional relationship with the ‘musical
object’. They are irreducible to mindreading, simulation, and sender-receiver modelling; as well as purely
‘in-the-head’ cognitivist approaches. As such, we argue that further empirical and theoretical frameworks
aimed at investigating musical interactions should investigate the domain of mutual codetermination
unfolding among music users and music makers (see D’Ausilio, Novembre, Fadiga, & Keller, 2015; Demos,
Chaffin, & Kant, 2014; Glowinski, Mancini, Cowie, Camurri, Chiorri, & Doherty, 2013).
3. Conclusion: dynamically open co-creation of music
In this chapter we examined how a phenomenological and enactive perspective on embodied musical
interactivity enriched by the notion of ‘participatory sense-making’ may inspire a more nuanced
understanding of the complex dynamics involved in joint musical practices. In doing so we are heeding the
call of Moran (2014b), who shares with us some of the same worries concerning the legacy of individualism
in music psychology research - we agree with her that we need to highlight social interactions as the heart of
joint musical behaviours and develop our research agenda accordingly. With this in mind, we find that
enactive-friendly approaches to cognition provide a fertile ground for such an enterprise - one that may open
fascinating new perspectives for the study of human musicality and cognition (van der Schyff, 2015). To
anticipate a likely objection, however, we want to clarify that we do not endorse an implicit version of
behaviourism, or interactionism. Enactivism differs from both. First, as acknowledged by Moran (2014b),
enactivists do not tend to reduce ‘meaning’ to behaviour only. Meaning is rather ‘enacted’ through the
history of structural coupling between organisms and environment; it depends on neural and extra-neural
(bodily, wordly, interactive) factors and as such is not simply dependent on or causal to behavior. Rather,
behavior and meaning, perception and action, low level and high level, are always mutually and dynamically
interacting in non-linear terms. This makes enactive approaches to music cognition highly attractive, not
only with regard to studying the relationship between music and movement, but also for the processes of
interaction and meaning-generation itself. In fact, while we recognise the outstanding work made by recent
studies on movements analysis for communication, sensorimotor synchronization, and interactions among
performers (e.g. Badino, D’ausilio, Glowinski, Camurri, & Fadiga, 2014; Repp, 2005) we also notice the risk
of being committed to an individualist or Cartesian framework when movements are not coherently
integrated with the constitutive dynamics of meaning-making and interaction. We say ‘Cartesian’ because
some may interpret the focus on movement analysis as representing movement as a distinct category from
cognitive processes, giving rise to the dichotomy we previously discussed between inner subjective
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experience and objective external world. This may emerge, for example, when the notion of mental
representation is adopted to describe the way in which performers elaborate a stimulus ‘in the head’ before
generating a relevant behavioral outcome (e.g. Davidson, 2005). Also, our framework is different from
interactionism (see De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2013). Indeed, while we consider interactivity to be necessary
for understanding (music) cognition, we do not endorse a view that sees embodied interactions as sufficient
for cognitive processes to take place. Rather, interactions are understood as fundamental to sense-making,
which shapes how living systems engage with the world and as autonomous entities; they entail the study of
how individual and participatory forms of sense-making relate and affect each other in non-reductionist
terms (Di Paolo & De Jaegher 2016).
Lastly, while we argue that methodological individualism may fall of short of capturing the concrete
dynamics of musical interactions, we do not attempt to make interactivity the only factor in play. This is best
understood when considering how dynamical systems may elegantly model interactive situations (Kelso,
1995). Good examples of the application of dynamic system to musical performance and entrainment come
from Clayton (2013), while other studies have focused on musical tonality, (Large, 2010), and interactive
performance and artificial systems (Zhang & Miranda, 2007) among others. Dynamic systems are indeed
useful in characterizing living systems as truly open, context-dependent, but at the same time “patterned and
recurrent” (Colombetti, 2014, p. 58) creatures. As De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) put it, considering
interactions as autonomous processes allows dynamic systems models to study the histories of coordination,
breakdowns, and recoveries that characterise self-sustaining interactions at different levels and time scales.
Along these lines, exploring the degrees of interactions occurring in real time among sense-makers may
reveal interesting features of what musical interactions entail. This could shed light, for example, on whether
a system comprised of performers with similar degrees of expertise will suffer fewer perturbations and be
thus more stable in terms of performance accuracy when compared to music-makers with different years of
musical training (see Schiavio & Cummins, 2015). Moreover, modelling how the loss and regain of
coordinated behavior impacts individual musical choices and the perceived expressivity of the musical
material could shed new light on how sense-makers gain new contextual significance through interactions -
how they negotiate emotional, expressive, sensorimotor, and communicative musical skills to ‘bring forth’
the music in real time. While many more possibilities remain to be considered, we hope to have provided
here a useful introduction to how the idea of participatory sense-making can help better understand the
complex dynamics governing both the flexibility and openness of musical creations, as well as the dialogical,
active, and participatory nature of musicians in interaction.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Dylan van der Schyff and Nikki Moran, whose comments on our first drafts improved the
quality of this chapter. We also thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful
suggestions and remarks.
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... Interaction between participants at an affective level may lead to a change in perspective or an emergence of a shared understanding depending on how the interaction is designed. More recent work has explored interaction between musicians as a form of "participatory sense-making" [36]. Such projects have explored participatory sense-making in joint musical practice, and posit that the way in which musicians play together may be best understood as 'mutual incorporation' [36]. ...
... More recent work has explored interaction between musicians as a form of "participatory sense-making" [36]. Such projects have explored participatory sense-making in joint musical practice, and posit that the way in which musicians play together may be best understood as 'mutual incorporation' [36]. ...
... Here sense-making is always participatory in nature, "because both the object and the dynamical process shaping it are possible only through the systematic and recursive influence of each individual on another [36]. Within the context of co-designing auditory displays with implant listeners, participatory sense-making through collaborative music making could be one way in which a shared aesthetic of sound could emerge from the complex dynamics that entail the improvisational process of music creation, along with the dialogic and participatory nature of music in interaction [36]. ...
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This paper advocates for the position that aurally diverse methodologies for designing auditory displays are needed, that not only take into account varied hearing capacities, but also conceive of a participatory and trans-disciplinary approach for collectively engaging diverse forms and conversations about listening, and shared associations with auditory imagery. Further, in light of the complex history that the notion of hearing disability and the evolution of commercial sound technology has had within the normalizing agenda of medical institutions, a call for methods of engagement that necessarily depart from the ubiquitous model of clinical testing for the ideal ‘ear’ is made. The paper illustrates this position by extrapolating possibilities within the context of a subset of machine mediated listening, specifically cochlear implant based listening. It proceeds by speculating how auditory displays that rely on temporal perception may produce shared associations in auditory imagery, and a meeting ground for unaided listening and cochlear implant based listening in the social acoustic world. Building upon previous work by scholars who originally conceptualized the notion of auraldiversity, the paper identifies a list of creative propositions to serve as a guide to shape outcomes and participatory modes of engagement using sonic arts practices. These include methods from sound art practitioners that have creatively dealt with affordances of sound to question normative listening, explore new aesthetics of sound, and blend collaborative processes with cognitive aspects of social listening through a collective elicitation of auditory imagery. By diversifying the process of designing auditory displays, we can challenge and contrast traditional models of testing for the ’ideal’ ear, to re-route auditory display research and design towards embracing hearing diversity. The paper invites the reader and the wider auditory display community to frame more such opportunities to adopt participatory methodologies for designing sonification for aural diversity.
... Participatory musical sense-making involves participating in each other's sense-making of music through a shared, active involvement in music (see [62], p. 31). It allows for the cocreation and joint understanding of music as it develops over time. ...
... The enactivist approach asserts the living body as the cognitive system. In other words, the regulation and control of cognition as a homeostatic system are determined by its biological structure (Schiavio and Jaegher, 2017). Thus, cognition can be seen as the action Varela et al. (1991, p. 172): ...
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This chapter presents a retrospective of five interactive systems I have developed focusing on how machines can respond to body movement in music performance. In particular, I have been interested in understanding more about how humans and non-human entities can share musical control and agency. First, I give an overview of my musical and aesthetic background in experimental music practice and a less conventional approach to sound and music control. Then follows a presentation of embodiment and music cognition theories that informed the techniques and methods I employed while developing these systems. Then comes the retrospective section structured around five projects. Biostomp explores the unintentionality of body signals when used for music interaction. Vrengt demonstrates musical possibilities of sonic microinteraction and shared control. RAW seeks unconventional control through chaos and automation. Playing in the “air” employs deep learning to map muscle exertions to the sound of an “air” instrument. The audiovisual instrument CAVI uses generative modeling to automate live sound processing and investigates the varying sense of agency. These projects show how an artistic–scientific approach can diversify artistic repertoires of musical artificial intelligence through embodied cognition.
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In this response to Leman and Maes's paper in this issue, we raise a couple of concerns about the authors' particular approach to embodied music cognition, drawing selectively on their other writings to enrich our interpretation of this target article, while pointing to a few of the many other legitimate research paths that can also fall under this label. We explore two underlying dichotomies implicit in the research programme adumbrated by Leman and Maes – cognition/embodiment and perception/performance – and implications for their theory of embodied music cognition. We then examine research that has focussed on the perspective of the music performer.
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We summarize some of the main proposals of the enactive approach to social understanding and discuss some common misreadings of the notion of participatory sense-making. The emphasis on the role played by social interaction in the enactive perspective is sometimes misinterpreted as the adoption of an interactionist stance, whereby individual processes are less relevant. This is not the case, and we proceed to explain and exemplify the central role played by individual agency, subpersonal processes and subjective personal experience in the framework of participatory sense-making. This is clear from how social interaction is defined as involving the co-arising of autonomous relational patterns, not under the full control of any participant, but without loss of individual autonomy of those engaged in the social encounter. We discuss how interactive patterns can sustain a deep entanglement between brain, body and interactive dynamics during social engagement, as well as the functional role played in some case by collective dynamics. The enactive approach is neither individualistic, nor interactionist. However, we express skepticism regarding the usefulness of hybrid approaches, which perpetuate dualistic distinctions between mind and body. Instead, the tensions in the notion of participatory sense-making are elaborated dialectically, demonstrating how complex forms of social agency, including language, develop from the primordial tension in participatory sense-making.
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In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied. This entails that our minds are necessarily spread throughout our living, organismic bodies and belong to their complete neurobiological constitution. So minds like ours are necessarily alive. The second claim is that essentially embodied minds are self-organizing thermodynamic systems. This entails that our mental lives consist in the possibility and actuality of moving our own living organismic bodies through space and time, by means of our conscious desires. The upshot is that we are essentially minded animals who help to create the natural world through our own agency. This doctrine--the Essential Embodiment Theory--is a truly radical idea which subverts the traditionally opposed and seemingly exhaustive categories of Dualism and Materialism, and offers a new paradigm for contemporary mainstream research in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience.
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The discovery of audiovisual mirror neurons in monkeys gave rise to the hypothesis that premotor areas are inherently involved not only when observing actions but also when listening to action-related sound. However, the whole-brain functional formation underlying such "action-listening" is not fully understood. In addition, previous studies in humans have focused mostly on relatively simple and overexperienced everyday actions, such as hand clapping or door knocking. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to ask whether the human action-recognition system responds to sounds found in a more complex sequence of newly acquired actions. To address this, we chose a piece of music as a model set of acoustically presentable actions and trained non-musicians to play it by ear. We then monitored brain activity in subjects while they listened to the newly acquired piece. Although subjects listened to the music without performing any movements, activation was found bilaterally in the frontoparietal motor-related network (including Broca's area, the premotor region, the intraparietal sulcus, and the inferior parietal region), consistent with neural circuits that have been associated with action observations, and may constitute the human mirror neuron system. Presentation of the practiced notes in a different order activated the network to a much lesser degree, whereas listening to an equally familiar but motorically unknown music did not activate this network. These findings support the hypothesis of a "hearing-doing" system that is highly dependent on the individual's motor repertoire, gets established rapidly, and consists of Broca's area as its hub.
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In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science -- the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study of emotion in psychology and neuroscience. In the course of her discussion, Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basic emotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodily nature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory, the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy, Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to their complexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy of cognitive science. © 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.