Abstract
In this paper, we outline a theoretical account of the relationship between technology and human musicality. An enactive and biocultural position is adopted that assumes a close coevolutionary relationship between the two. From this position, we aim at clarifying how the present and emerging technologies, becoming embedded and embodied in our lifeworld, inevitably co-constitute and transform musical practices, skills, and ways of making sense of music. Therefore, as a premise of our scrutiny, we take it as a necessity to more deeply understand the ways that humans become affiliated to the ever-changing instruments of music technology, in order to better understand the coevolutionary impact on learning and other aspects of musicality being constituted together with these instruments. This investigation is particularly motivated by the rapid and diverse development of mobile applications and their potential impact, as musical instruments, on learning and cognizing music. The term appification refers to enactive processes in which applications (i.e., apps) and their user interfaces, developed for various ecosystems of mobile smart technology, partake in reorganizing our ways of musical acting and thinking. On the basis of the theoretical analysis, we argue that understanding the phenomenon of the human–technology relationship, and its implications for our embodied musical minds, requires acknowledging (1) how apps contribute to conceptual constructing of musical activities, (2) how apps can be designed or utilized in a way that reinforces the epistemological continuum between embodied and abstract sense-making, and (3) how apps become merged with musical instruments.
Highlights
Technology may be commonly understood as a human-made, tool-like resource
As we can see from the above discussion, technologization and appification of musical practices – while transforming the tools of music-making – are able to promote certain conceptual attitudes, values and ideologies involved with these practices
We have outlined new theoretical formulations for understanding the coevolution of technology and human musicality. This theoretical contribution concerns merging the post-phenomenological discussion of the human–technology relationship with the recent theoretical developments in cognitive sciences, namely in regard to enactive and 4E cognition
Summary
Technology may be commonly understood as a human-made, tool-like resource. But in popular discourse, the development of technology is depicted as an inevitable process that evolves independently from humans, with a nature of its own occurring outside of being a human. Despite the differences across theoretical backgrounds applied here, the main premise of technological co-constitution of mind in action is taken to refer both to the biological idea of structural coupling between organism and environment and to the phenomenological idea of intentional co-constitution of experience Such a fusion of conceptual approaches is in line with the original motivation of positioning the enactive theory of cognition inside a deep circulation of sciences of mind (i.e., cognitive science) and human experience (i.e., phenomenology) (Varela et al, 1993; Thompson, 2007). We may see this as an example of how technologies potentially organize our ways of thinking and acting in a very pervasive manner
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