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Agency in Embodied Music Interaction
... Within interactive ecologies, performers can explore new forms of creative expression by engaging with machines in a collaborative or co-mediated fashion. Central to this dynamic is the idea of agency being distributed across human and machine participants [Moran, 2017]. ...
In this paper, we present an interactive performative ecosystem for two musicians, based on neural networks which estimate parameters for a virtual synthe-siser mimicking the performer's actions. In line with the conference's keyword, we designed the interaction allowing mutual sonic contamination between the musicians. We evaluated the proposed system with four different duets, asking the participants to provide insights in relation to each other and to the system itself .
... Schiavio and colleagues (2017a) state there is perceptual autonomy with regard to how people develop "afective-emotional interactions with music," which are dependent on their previous, embodied musical experiences. Moran (2017) proposes that the interactive processes of music listening happen through the participatory work between the experienced agency of the listener and the imagined entities -other musical agents, such as musicians performing the music, the composer who created the music, the voice (actual human voice or instrument-as-voice) heard in music, and the music as an act of narration (see also Levinson 2006). Thus, because of this intersubjective quality of music as a phenomenon, listening to music of our own selection can provide us comfort and help us to reduce loneliness. ...
... Agency is variously defined within interdisciplinary approaches within music scholarship 34 . As noted above with regard to agency in general, there have been multiple applications of the term in various areas -here including musicology, sociology, philosophy of education, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. ...
In this paper we offer a preliminary framework that highlights the relational nature of solo music-making, and its associated capacity to influence the constellation of habits and experiences one develops through acts of musicking. To do so, we introduce the notion of extended musical historicity and suggest that when novice and expert performers engage in individual musical practices, they often rely on an extended sense of agency which permeates their musical experience and shapes their creative outcomes. To support this view, we report on an exploratory, qualitative study conducted with novice and expert music performers. This was designed to elicit a range of responses, beliefs, experiences and meanings concerning the main categories of agency and creativity. Our data provide rich descriptions of solitary musical practices by both novice and expert performers, and reveal ways in which these experiences involve social contingencies that appear to generate or transform creative musical activity. We argue that recognition of the interactive components of individual musicking may shed new light on the cognition of solo and joint music performance, and should inspire the development of novel conceptual and empirical tools for future research and theory.
... As we have seen, the dynamics of joint musical performance depend on the moment-to-moment relationships between the players involved (see Moran, 2017;Ryan & Schiavio, 2019), which entail a constant push and pull between stability and instability. Sometimes this means dealing collectively with factors that might threaten the coherence of the musical environment, by adapting, for example, to a rhythmic or pitch error, making a tuning adjustment, or shifting the interpersonal coordination associated with a musical groove. ...
In this paper we argue that our comprehension of musical participation-the complex network of interactive dynamics involved in collaborative musical experience-can benefit from an analysis inspired by the existing frameworks of dynamical systems theory and coordination dynamics. These approaches can offer novel theoretical tools to help music researchers describe a number of central aspects of joint musical experience in greater detail, such as prediction, adaptivity, social cohesion, reciprocity, and reward. While most musicians involved in collective forms of musicking already have some familiarity with these terms and their associated experiences, we currently lack an analytical vocabulary to approach them in a more targeted way. To fill this gap, we adopt insights from these frameworks to suggest that musical participation may be advantageously characterized as an open, non-equilibrium, dynamical system. In particular, we suggest that research informed by dynamical systems theory might stimulate new interdisciplinary scholarship at the crossroads of musicology, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive (neuro)science, pointing toward new understandings of the core features of musical participation.
... A disapproving look from the other musicians in the stage will drive the choices made and the meaning of those choices for everyone involved. The possibilities of even this simple case are virtually infinite, and show how musical actions cannot be determined a priori, nor they are properly understood as fully individual products (Moran, 2017;Schiavio & De Jaegher, 2017;Schiavio & Høffding, 2015). Cultural, social, and contextual factors all contribute in defining and shaping one's musicking. ...
The conceptual resources of '4E' music cognition-i.e. the embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive paradigms have offered a rich set of tools to explore the nature of musical experience. Among these four approaches , the extended mind perspective has heretofore received less overall attention. In this paper we focus on further developing the musically extended mind-especially in regards to musical performance-drawing on recent third wave developments. After exploring the main tenets of first wave (parity between internal and external components), second wave (complementarity between internal and external components), and third wave (dynamically changing internal and external components, as well as extended and decentralized agency) accounts of the extended mind, we turn to introducing existent first and second wave positions on music cog-nition. While they offer important insights, we suggest that elements of the third wave, especially focused on decentralized agency, are needed to capture the complexities of musical performance. We apply the third wave tools to the case of music performance in order to show, first, the specific limitations of the first two waves focus on parity and complementarity and, second, how a third wave account may be developed by applying it within this particular context.
Este artigo versa sobre a agência rítmica individual e coletiva em experimentos que unem cultura e tecnologia, a partir da dança-música do Coco de Roda brasileiro. Cruzando metodologia metaperspectiva, tecnologia e teorias advindas dos campos da arte e da ciência, visamos contribuir para futuras proposições pedagógicas decoloniais em artes cênicas. Com base nos processos analisados, averiguou-se que a estrutura rítmica, a multimodalidade, a multicoordenação e a interação coletiva são marcadores da complexidade do Coco, ventilando-o como rico disparador de aprendizado, desde que devidamente contextualizado, num processo de tradução circunstanciado para a prática cênica.
A recently emerging view in music cognition holds that music is not only social and participatory in its production, but also in its perception, i.e. that music is in fact perceived as the sonic trace of social relations between a group of real or virtual agents. While this view appears compatible with a number of intriguing music cognitive phenomena, such as the links between beat entrainment and prosocial behaviour or between strong musical emotions and empathy, direct evidence is lacking that listeners are at all able to use the acoustic features of a musical interaction to infer the affiliatory or controlling nature of an underlying social intention. We created a novel experimental situation in which we asked expert music improvisers to communicate 5 types of non-musical social intentions, such as being domineering, dis-dainful or conciliatory, to one another solely using musical interaction. Using a combination of decoding studies, computational and psychoacoustical analyses, we show that both musically-trained and non musically-trained listeners can recognize relational intentions encoded in music, and that this social cog-nitive ability relies, to a sizeable extent, on the information processing of acoustic cues of temporal and harmonic coordination that are not present in any one of the musicians' channels, but emerge from the dynamics of their interaction. By manipulating these cues in two-channel audio recordings and testing their impact on the social judgements of non-musician observers, we finally establish a causal relationship between the affiliation dimension of social behaviour and musical harmonic coordination on the one hand, and between the control dimension and musical temporal coordination on the other hand. These results provide novel mechanistic insights not only into the social cognition of musical interactions, but also into that of non-verbal interactions as a whole.
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.