A Biosemiotic and Ecological Approach to Music Cognition: Event Perception Between Auditory Listening and Cognitive Economy

Abstract

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses the question whether we can conceive of music cognition in ecosemiotic terms. It claims that music knowledge must be generated as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world and calls forth a shift from a structural description of music as an artifact to a process-like approach to dealing with music. As listeners, we are observers who construct and organize our knowledge and bring with us our observational tools. What matters is not merely the sonic world in its objective qualities, but the world as perceived. In order to make these claims operational we can rely on the ecological concept of coping with the sonic world and the cybernetic concepts of artificial and adaptive devices. Listeners, on this view, are able to change their semantic relations with the sonic world through functional adaptations at the level of sensing, acting and coordinating between action and perception. This allows us to understand music in functional terms of what it affords to us and not merely in terms of its acoustic qualities. There are, however, degrees of freedom and constraints which shape the semiotization of the sonic world. As such we must consider the role of event perception and cognitive economy: listeners do not perceive the acoustical environment in terms of phenomenological descriptions but as ecological events.

Bringing Sounds into Use: Thinking of Sounds as Materials and a Sketch of Auditory Affordances

“…This is a particularly important point as affordances have not generally been given much consideration with regard to auditory phenomena and when they have it has usually only been in relation to music (e.g. [49][50][51][52]). This approach extends the scope of auditory affordances allowing for everyday tasks, like filling a glass of water using sound [86] to dancing with music (e.g.…”

Music practice and participation for psychological well-being: A review of how music influences positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment

“…Since sound perception has survival value for humans partly because of its capacity to activate various emotion induction "mechanisms," or "information-processing devices at different levels of the brain, which utilize distinct types of information to guide future behavior," Juslin (2013) correctly points out that "the emotions represent an extension of the perceptual process that enables us to infer not only the identity and location of an object, but also its potential consequences or 'affordances'" (p. 240, emphasis added; see also Krueger, 2014). Indeed, as Krueger (2014) recently argues in "Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind," "musical affordances -via soliciting different forms of entrainment -enhance the functionality of various endogenous, emotion-granting regulative processes, drawing novel experiences out of us with an expanded complexity and phenomenal character" (p. 1; for further fascinating discussion on musical 4 Musicae Scientiae embodiment and affordances, see Harrison & Loui, 2014;Hutka, Bidelman, & Moreno, 2013;Keebler, Wiltshire, Smith, Fiore, & Bedwell, 2014;Maes, Leman, Palmer, & Wanderley, 2014;Reybrouck, 2001Reybrouck, , 2005Reybrouck, , 2012Schäfer, Fachner, & Smukalla, 2013).…”

Timbral Environments: An Ecological Approach to the Cognition of Timbre

“…According to this view, the human body is an autonomous unit interacting with the environment through its sensors and effectors (Godøy, 2006), which is in concordance with the paradigm of embodied cognition (Leman, 2007). Analogically, music listeners can be considered as adaptive devices in that they organize their sensors and effectors to adapt themselves to the world, while simultaneously modifying it (Reybrouck, 2005). According to the representational theory of mind (Nussbaum, 2007), individuals use their bodies, throughout their lives, to develop a consciousness about themselves and the complexities of the surrounding environment.…”

“…If these categories can be empirically characterized and systematically differentiated, we could call them timbral environments. This would make them distinct from the classical approach to timbre and timbral spaces, and stress the ecological approach (Godøy, 2006;Leman, 2007;Reybrouck, 2005). For a visual comparison between the three different definitions, see Figure 2.…”