Music at Hand

Abstract

Musical instruments ground players’ actions and the sounds they create. Yet this book further claims that instruments mediate perception and imagination. Practicing an instrument builds bodily skills, while also fostering auditory-motor connections in players’ brains. These intersensory links reflect the ways that a particular instrument converts action into sound, the ways that it coordinates tonal and physical space. Reactivated in various ways, these connections can influence instrumentalists’ listening, improvisation, and composition. To investigate these effects, the book engages both classical and popular styles, from Bach to electronic music, from Beethoven to the blues. It uses Lewinian transformational theory to model instrumental interfaces and to analyze patterns of body-instrument interaction. Though based in music theory and analysis, the book also draws on psychology, including cognitive neuroscience, and the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Ultimately, it argues that music cognition is not simply embodied; it is also conditioned by musical technology.

Book Review: Musical Bodies, Musical Minds. Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality by Dylan van der Schyff, Andrea Schiavio, and David J. Elliott

“…This book ambitiously contributes to the interdisciplinary orientation that is so typical of current music studies, with a special focus on the embodied and ecological dimensions of music perception, cognition, and practice. As such, this volume connects in various ways with related and inspiring books by Clarke (2005), Borgo (2005), Cox (2016), Leman (2007), De Souza (2017), Høffding (2018), Kozak (2019), andReybrouck (2021). Contrary to these related books, however, Musical Bodies, Musical Minds is "the first monograph fully dedicated to developing a comprehensive enactive/4E view of human musicality" (MBMM, p. vii).…”

Grounding Creativity in Music Perception? A Multidisciplinary Conceptual Analysis

“…Music scholarship inspired by enactivism, embodied cognition, and ecological psychology (e.g., Clarke, 2005;De Souza, 2017;Godøy, 2003;Iyer, 2002;Leman, 2007;Reybrouck, 2005; van der Schyff et al, 2022) has offered fresh conceptual tools to study musical activity and its variety of manifestations from a perspective that highlights the crucial role of action and bodily experience in perception (Leman & Maes, 2014;Maes, 2016;Maes et al, 2014aMaes et al, , 2014bOvery & Molnar-Szakacs, 2009). This approach places considerable emphasis on the meanings emerging from the multiple types of interaction unfolding between agents and their musical environments, ideas which have begun to be explored elsewhere; for example, in the work of Moran (2014) and Krueger (2013).…”

Embodied Cognition in Performers of Large Acoustic Instruments as a Method of Designing New Large Digital Musical Instruments

“…In the taxonomy of affordance theory [3] [4] [6], it could be said that the size of an instrument influences its affordances, that is the possibilities, such as the gestural language for performance. Additionally, as De Souza argues, affordances offer the performer 'distributed cognition' in that an instrument may 'know' things for the performer [5]. In this way, the performer does not need to know every detail about the instrument to play it.…”