Abstract
The agenda in music research that is broadly recognized as embodied music cognition has arrived hand-in-hand with a social interpretation of music, focusing on the real-world basis of its performance, and fostering an empirical approach to musician movement regarding the communicative function and potential of those movements. However, embodied cognition emerged from traditional cognitivism, which produced a body of scientific explanation of music-theoretic concepts. The analytical object of this corpus is based on the particular imagined encounter of a listener responding to an idealized “work.” Although this problem of essentialism has been identified within mainstream musicology, the lingering effects may spill over into interdisciplinary, empirical research. This paper defines the situation according to its legacy of individualism, and offers an alternative sketch of musical activity as performance event, a model that highlights the social interaction processes at the heart of musical behavior. I describe some recent empirical work based on interaction-oriented approaches, arguing that this particular focus – on the social interaction process itself – creates a distinctive and promising agenda for further research into embodied music cognition.
Highlights
This paper examines the social implications of embodied music cognition, drawing attention to the individualism evident in some existing work
Similar evidence for an emergent, autonomous interaction process in co-performed music may provide a specific and tractable problem for empirical music research, offering a particular way of approaching the social, embodied experience of live music performance. Recent work on such lines is underway: output from the SIEMPRE project directly addresses the emergent aspects of social interaction in co-performance, including a study examining whether observers can judge from a recording of a violinist whether he is playing alone or in a group (Glowinski et al, 2013)
This paper set out to examine the social implications of an embodied approach to music cognition, proposing that the prevailing understanding of musical communication, underpinning a broad range of research into perception and performance, may yet rest on an individualistic account of a socially oriented human behavior
Summary
Edited by: Werner Goebl, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria. The agenda in music research that is broadly recognized as embodied music cognition has arrived hand-in-hand with a social interpretation of music, focusing on the real-world basis of its performance, and fostering an empirical approach to musician movement regarding the communicative function and potential of those movements. This paper defines the situation according to its legacy of individualism, and offers an alternative sketch of musical activity as performance event, a model that highlights the social interaction processes at the heart of musical behavior. I describe some recent empirical work based on interactionoriented approaches, arguing that this particular focus – on the social interaction process itself – creates a distinctive and promising agenda for further research into embodied music cognition
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