Music Knowledge Construction. Enactive, Ecological, and Biosemiotic Claims

Is musical meaning reducible to knowledge of the structure of the music, and is this to be conveyed in logocentric or logogenic terms— assuming that its meaning is conducive to verbal description— or should we conceive of musical meaning in musicogenic terms, with music having properties that refer mainly to the music (Tagg, 2013)? Is music- structural knowledge to be equated with pre- existing concepts and labels that are assigned to the sonorous unfolding, or should we rely on moment- to-moment experience of the unfolding through time? It is the main distinction between the lexico- semantic and the experiential approach, which has its conceptual grounding in the discrete/continuous dichotomy.Much research on musical meaning has focused rather narrowly on the lexico- semantic dimensions of conceptualization, equating sense- making with a logocentric view on music cognition. It is the goal of this chapter to argue against this narrow view and to consider music knowledge construction from an enactive point of view. Revolving around perception- action loops and sensorimotor couplings, it offers a theoretical framework that is grounded in the concept of circularity between an organism and its environment in an attempt to provide a descriptive and explanatory theory in which the role of functional significance in knowledge construction is emphasized on the basis of deictic, enactive, ecological, and biosemiotic claims. Music knowledge construction, in this view, must go beyond a conception of passive information pickup in favor of a definition of the listener as an adaptive device that generates appropriate behavior in reaction to the continuous changes in its internal and external state. As such, it stresses the role of adaptive knowledge construction in a way that perception and action are linked in a continuous process of sense- making and interaction with the environment. These interactions can be manifest— as in processes of sensorimotor integration (such as playingn instrument or singing)—or virtual (with movements simulated merely at the level of imagery) with a gradual shift from presentational immediacy to symbolic representation of the sounds.

ISBN:9781138657403

Jaar van publicatie:2017