Music listening as adaptive behaviour: Enaction meets neuroscience

Background in musicology. This paper sketches the recent disciplinary history of musicology, stressing the shift from a disembodied and detached approach to the musical structure to an approach that takes the human listener as a starting point. It discusses the role of embodied cognition and the role of enactive models for the study of the way how listeners cope with sounds, relying to some extent also on the phenomenological approach of “music as heard” and “music as experienced” that was advocated already in the 1980s. Background in cognitive science and neuroscience. The enactive approach, as applied to music, is part of the emerging field of 4E cognition, which is an umbrella term for embodied, embedded, extended and enacted cognition. It is elaborated in this paper, more in particular its relations with the sensorimotor approach to music cognition, and is brought in relation to neuroscience, which has been seen as opposed to the embodied approach, due to its detached and disembodied conceptions of mental computation and representation. This has been challenged by more dynamic approaches in music and brain studies, as exemplified in the contributions from neuroaesthetics, neuroplasticity and brain connectivity studies as applied to music. Aims. The major aim of this paper is to bridge the gap between a disembodied and detached conception of neuroscience and recent developments in cognitive science, that take an enactive and embodied view to music cognition. Main contribution. This paper is an overview and programmatic paper. Starting from the inner/outer distinction in the philosophy of mind, it first delves into the position of the enactive approach within the broader field of embodied cognition, stressing also the role of the sensorimotor approach and action and perception studies. It then sketches the possible contributions from the neurosciences to the enactive approach to dealing with music, revolving mainly around the concepts of neurodynamics, neuroaesthetics and neuroplasticity and the conception of music listening as adaptive behaviour. It is argued that the emerging field of connectomics, which studies the networks of the brain, may play a crucial role in understanding some of the underlying mechanisms of musical experience. Implications. The major implication of this paper is the emphasis it puts on a dynamic and ongoing description and assessment of the musical experience. It provides an overview of existing techniques for empirical testing as well as possible new directions for future research. Central in this is the dynamic approach to music cognition and the search for a kind of real-time and ongoing mapping between the sonorous articulation and the lived experience by the listener.

Jaar van publicatie:2021

Toegankelijkheid:Open