Abstract
The question motivating the work presented here, starting from a view of music as embodied and situated activity, is how can we account for the complexity of interactive music performance situations. These are situations in which human performers interact with responsive technologies, such as sensor-driven technology or sound synthesis affected by analysis of the performed sound signal. This requires investigating in detail the underlying mechanisms, but also providing a more holistic approach that does not lose track of the complex whole constituted by the interactions and relationships of composers, performers, audience, technologies, etc. The concept of affordances has frequently been invoked in musical research, which has seen a “bodily turn” in recent years, similar to the development of the embodied cognition approach in the cognitive sciences. We therefore begin by broadly delineating its usage in the cognitive sciences in general, and in music research in particular. We argue that what is still missing in the discourse on musical affordances is an encompassing theoretical framework incorporating the sociocultural dimensions that are fundamental to the situatedness and embodiment of interactive music performance and composition. We further argue that the cultural affordances framework, proposed by Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014) and recently articulated further by Ramstead et al. (2016) in this journal, although not previously applied to music, constitutes a promising starting point. It captures and elucidates this complex web of relationships in terms of shared landscapes and individual fields of affordances. We illustrate this with examples foremost from the first author's artistic work as composer and performer of interactive music. This sheds new light on musical composition as a process of construction—and embodied mental simulation—of situations, guiding the performers' and audience's attention in shifting fields of affordances. More generally, we believe that the theoretical perspectives and concrete examples discussed in this paper help to elucidate how situations—and with them affordances—are dynamically constructed through the interactions of various mechanisms as people engage in embodied and situated activity.
Highlights
Given that this paper deals with music, but is submitted to a cognitive science/psychology journal, we assume that the majority of readers are cognitive scientists, and only a minority of readers are familiar with music theory
What is still missing in the field of music research, in our opinion, is a more encompassing theoretical framework incorporating the sociocultural dimensions that are fundamental to the situatedness and embodiment of music performance, providing a detailed account of the underlying mechanisms, and providing a more holistic approach that does not lose track of the complex whole constituted by the interaction of composers, performers, audience, technologies, etc
One of the driving forces behind this research has been the question how we can begin to account for the complexity of interactive music performance situations and analyze details without losing track of the whole
Summary
Given that this paper deals with music, but is submitted to a cognitive science/psychology journal, we assume that the majority of readers are cognitive scientists, and only a minority of readers are familiar with music theory. The first question that comes to mind for the average cognitive scientist, who is to some degree familiar with Gibson’s (1979/1986) notion of affordances, might be whether music really has affordances in the first place. Gibson was mainly concerned with the sense of vision and the affordances of concrete physical objects. These were affordances conveyed by the optical array and perceived by agents being far from stationary, but moving about interacting with those objects, such as the sit-ability of chairs or the graspability of cups. Hearing deals with concrete objects, since sound carries information about a source. Gibson’s ecological psychology is still highly influential, not least in research on embodied cognition (e.g., Varela et al, 1991; Chemero, 2009; Shapiro, 2011), and, widely debated, the concept of affordance is still very much used (e.g., Thill et al, 2013; Sakreida et al, 2016) and new conceptual frameworks are continuously being developed (e.g., Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014; Ramstead et al, 2016; Davis and Chouinard, 2017)
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