Music in the flesh: Embodied simulation in musical understanding.

Abstract

The embodied paradigm, originally developed in the fields of theoretical biology (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) and linguistics (Lakoff& Johnson, 1999), holds human cognition, even in its highest level inferential processes, is rooted in sensorimotor processes link the agent to the world in which she is embedded. As Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2007) point out, studies show not only how perceptual and motor representations influence people's cognitive processing, but how sensorimotor representations are tied to symbolic information about the self and the (p. 543; see also Barsalou, 2003; Markman & Brendl, 2005). Recent attempts to apply this perspective to music cognition, whose first examples were the seminal works by Hatten (2004) and Zbikowski (2002), advocate the crucial role of the musicians' well the perceivers' bodies for musical understanding (Leman, 2007; Reybrouck, 2001, 2006). This standpoint holds a basic form of musical meaning's ascription is actionbased, radically entwined with the level of motor knowledge of the listener or performer (Schiavio, 2012). Traditional music psychology often employs computational models to investigate musical comprehension, where an agent's mind is seen a computer processes the musical signal thanks to species-specific brain mechanisms (Lyon & Shamma, 1996). In contrast, the embodied perspective assumes cognition depends on processes are intrinsically connected to the organism's body, thus being widely distributed beyond the boundaries of the brain (Shapiro, 2010).In this article, we emphasize the need of deepening such perspective by referring to the closely related notion of Embodied Simulation (ES) and have a close look at its main applications in the psychology of music. ES is a basic functional mechanism that exploits, not only but mainly, the intrinsic functional organization of the motor system (Gallese, 2011, p. 37). ES has been first introduced in the current debates on intersubjectivity to posit the basic skills of social cognition (understanding others' sensations and emotions) do not require any kind of explicit mindreading (Gallese, 2001, 2005). This position has been interpreted a nonpropositional, unconscious, form of mental simulation (Goldman, 2006), based on the unmediated processes underlining the mirror-neurons activity1 (Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, 1996; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, Fogassi, 1996), which accounts for basic social interactions by means of a neurobiologically plausible and theoretically unitary (Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2011, p. 1).An application of this conceptual framework to the realm of music experience has been posited by Overy and Molnar-Szakacs (2009). They have suggested a representational equivalence between the perception of a given-musical-directed-motor act and its neural simulation, which would allow the listeners to experience a musical feedback as if (Damasio, 2003) they were actually performing the sound-producing action themselves. This action-simulation mechanism is consistent with the idea subjects can reenact their own motor experience through an automatic, unconscious, process in order to give sense with their own body to a musical surface. Two implications can be drawn from this assumption-(a) Perceiving music consists in the implicit knowledge of the sensorimotor contingencies2 of the heard sound-producing actions (Reybrouck, 2006).(b) The neurons recruited during this simulation are the same the ones involved while performing or listening to the related sound(s) of the same (chain of) goal-directed action(s) (Kohler et al., 2002; see also Bangert & Altenmuller, 2003; Chen, Penhune, & Zatorre, 2008; Maes, Leman, Palmer, & Wanderley, 2014).This view is supported by empirical studies concerning the activation of sensorimotor networks during the observation of musicians' performances or during passive listening (see D'Ausilio, 2007, 2009; Novembre, Ticini, Schutz-Bosbach, & Keller, 2014). …