4E Music Pedagogy and the Principles of Self-Organization

Abstract

Recent approaches in the cognitive and psychological sciences conceive of mind as an Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive (or 4E) phenomenon. While this has stimulated important discussions and debates across a vast array of disciplines, its principles, applications, and explanatory power have not yet been properly addressed in the domain of musical development. Accordingly, it remains unclear how the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition of musical skills might be understood through the lenses of this approach, and what this might offer for practical areas like music education. To begin filling this gap, the present contribution aims to explore central aspects of music pedagogy through the lenses of 4E cognitive science. By discussing cross-disciplinary research in music, pedagogy, psychology, and philosophy of mind, we will provide novel insights that may help inspire a richer understanding of what musical learning entails. In doing so, we will develop conceptual bridges between the notion of ‘autopoiesis’ (the property of continuous self-regeneration that characterizes living systems) and the emergent dynamics contributing to the flourishing of one’s musical life. This will reveal important continuities between a number of new teaching approaches and principles of self-organization. In conclusion, we will briefly consider how these conceptual tools align with recent work in interactive cognition and collective music pedagogy, promoting the close collaboration of musicians, pedagogues, and cognitive scientists.

Young Musicians' Learning of Expressive Performance: The Importance of Dialogic Teaching and Modeling

“…This relates to initiatives advocating for informal, exploratory, collaborative and embodied learning (e.g., Schiavio et al, 2019). It remains to be examined how interactive learning can be further enhanced in such contexts, integrating various activities such as improvisation, listening, performance by ear (e.g., Green, 2017) and the adoption of a self-organizational perspective oriented toward rich musical experiences (Schiavio and van der Schyff, 2018;Schiavio, 2019).…”

Understanding Human–Technology Relations Within Technologization and Appification of Musicality

“…With scholars investigating different aspects of musical experience, such as musical emotions (Krueger, 2014;Schiavio et al, 2017), sociality of music (Loaiza, 2016), music education (Van der Schyff, 2015), and ontology of music (Schiavio, 2012), in the light of an active and embodied view of the mind, one may even speak of an emerging paradigm of 4E music cognition. The very basic idea of 4E approaches to music cognition can be seen as an attempt to provide an alternative to long-held cognitivist views of the mind and music: instead of seeing music and the experiencing subject as distinct entities, focusing on the mechanistic and representational information processing activity of cognitive processes, music is regarded as something that emerges from the fundamentally bodily interaction between an organism and its musical world (Schiavio, 2014;Schiavio and van der Schyff, 2018). The focus is not on the sub-personal cognitive mechanisms or on the music as objective things but on the action done with music, or on music as a verb, musicking (Small, 1998), instead of a noun: music as something that is done rather than something that exists in itself as an objective thing.…”

“…As we discussed with respect to 4E approaches to music cognition, it is a bit problematic to propose a clear-cut distinction between natural music abilities and technologically/culturally constructed ones. Instead, we could see musical skills and ideas as emerging from the interplay of the human, technologies, and the environment, or from "hybrid extended cognitive systems" (Schiavio and van der Schyff, 2018). This is most obviously the case with musical instruments and the acquisition of instrumental technique associated with them, which, as Jonathan De Souza has noted, "affects the ways that players perceive, understand, and imagine music" (De Souza, 2017, p. 2).…”

Persistent Effects of Musical Training on Mathematical Skills of Children With Developmental Dyscalculia

“…"4E" stands for Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive -four overlapping principles that help describe mental life in a novel and fascinating way. These principles challenge more traditional accounts of cognition (including music cognition) by emphasizing the fluid integration of neural, bodily, and environmental factors (Schiavio and van der Schyff, 2018;Ryan and Schiavio, 2019). For instance, researchers working from an Embodied perspective might offer novel tools to analyze their data, which more consistently integrate aspects of functions and processes distributed across the whole bodies of their participant(s) (Gallagher, 2005).…”