Directions in Music by Miles Davis: Using the Ecological Approach to Perception and Embodied Cognition to Analyze the Creative Use of Recording Technology in Bitches Brew.

Abstract

In 1969 Miles Davis started to use the credit "Directions in Music by Miles Davis" on his record sleeves as a statement asserting his creative control of the recording process. This article develops the idea of using the ecological approach to perception and embodied cognition to provide a psychological/cognitive basis for an Actor Network Theory (and to a lesser extent Social Construction of Technology) analysis for the collaborative creative and technological network which came together for the making of Miles Davis' 1969 album, Bitches Brew. Using the notions of invariant properties and affordances from Gibson's work on the ecological approach to perception and of schemata from Lakoff's work in embodied cognition, the article seeks to provide a more nuanced approach to the process of translation in terms of the influence that agents exert upon each other.