sic to drug altered music cognition. Some also apply enactive and ecologi- cal approaches to music cognition, which makes the book an interesting .... proaches, see the discussion in Matyja 2011) ... conscience, and memory in Latin American.
Enactive Cognitive Science
Me, Music, and I: Embodied and Enactive Cognition meets Music Jakub Ryszard Matyja • Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw • jrmatyja/at/gmail.com > Upshot • The fact that both “consciousness” and “music” are quite elusive terms makes the attempt to explain the nature (or even the existence of) “musical consciousness” a compelling quest. The papers in this book tackle these problems in an engaging way, ranging from sociology of music to drug altered music cognition. Some also apply enactive and ecological approaches to music cognition, which makes the book an interesting read for constructivists.
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avid & Eric Clarke’s Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives is a broad publication addressing scholars interested in each of the research fields mentioned in the book’s title. Consisting of twenty wellcrafted chapters, the book draws heavily on the embodied approaches to consciousness, including a chapter on enactivism. What are the possible relationships between music and consciousness? In the preface chapter of the book, its editors point out just a few: the mere similarity based on the observation that both of music and consciousness combine social, conceptual, technical, emotional, perceptual, and motor attributes (xix); and, more importantly, the fact that as music has the capacity to both reflect human subjectivity and be the powerful element responsible for constituting this subjectivity, it thus can offer us important insights into consciousness (xx). The opening chapter of the book, “Music, Phenomenology, and Time Consciousness” by David Clarke offers the reader insight into the importance of Edmund Husserl in his studies on both music (further developed, as the author reminds us, by scholars such as Jason Brown and commented on by Jacques Derrida) and time consciousness. Interestingly enough, Husserl (and his ideas) returns in almost half of the papers included in the book. David Clarke’s chapter is followed by Eugene Montague’s paper, which aims to compare the famous “hard problem” of consciousness (as argued by philosophers such as David Chalmers) with a similar issue in
musical research, namely “the incorporation of subjective experience within an objective explanatory framework” (29). Furthermore, and perhaps interestingly for constructivists, Montague argues that: musicology would do well to revisit theoretical “ perspectives that reject a fundamental opposition between objective and subjective, such as the (European) Continental tradition of phenomenology, since such perspectives have proved useful in meeting challenges posed in the study of consciousness. (29)
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Montague returns to Husserl’s analysis of time consciousness, aiming to use it to understand the objectivity of a musical piece through the subjective experience of the body, while acknowledging the important insights of Antonio Damasio in this research area (for accounts of embodied music cognition see, for instance, Leman 2008). In the subsequent chapter, Michael Gallope offers a Derrida-inspired deconstructivist approach to the phenomenology of consciousness, leading him to skepticism about musical experience and the very existence of musical objects as such. In a similar fashion, while referring to French philosopher Jacques Lacan’s thought and that of other philosophers interested in psychoanalysis, Ian Biddle explores the topic (and models) of musical listening in everyday lives. The fifth chapter of the book – Bennett Hogg’s “Enactive consciousness, intertextuality, and musical free improvisation: de-
Review of Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives edited by David and Erik Clarke. Oxford University Press, New York, 2011. ISBN 978-0199553792 · 380 pages
constructing mythologies and finding connections” may be of direct interest to the constructivist community. This is because Hogg draws on the classical work by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, especially the connection between: …the idea of consciousness understood as “ enactive cognition and the perceptions within philosophy that knowledge depends on being in a world that is inseparable from our bodies, our language, and our social history – in short, from our embodiment. (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1993: 149)
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Hogg discusses the connection between such an understanding of consciousness and a speculative and specifically musical/sonic
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interpretation of the idea of intertextuality. He then inspiringly turns to an analysis of Jerzy Grotowsky’s pioneering works in experimental theatre and its leading idea of “think[ing] with the whole body” while improvising. Importantly, Hogg uses Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s idea to tackle and criticize what he calls “nature–culture binarism,” while introducing the readers to the principles of their version of enactivism. In the following, sixth, chapter of the collection, Ansuam Biswas discusses the issues of mind, meditation, and music as movement. Importantly, in this chapter Biswas gives an account of theories of the biological value of music along with the importance of music for meditation and the relations between music and movement (including the relations between “motion” and “emotion”). Bethany Lowe (in the chapter entitled “‘In the head, only the heard…’: music, consciousness, and Buddhism”) reflects on meditation and its relation to music, often reminding readers of the works of Varela & Shear (1999) on the first-person methodologies and approaches to consciousness. In a similarly Eastern fashion, the eighth chapter of the book covers the issues of North Indian (Hindustani) classical music and consciousness. David Clarke and Tara Kini’s contention is that Indian music both “emanates and is able to instill deep states of consciousness” (138). Interestingly, the authors of this paper are themselves practitioners in this field. The following chapter, on the other hand, shifts away from Eastern meditation music to the issues of William James’s influence on music, computing, and consciousness. Its author, Meurig Beynon, aims to show how James’s thinking, especially that connected with his views on computing, can do justice to the varieties of musical experiences without compromising the integrity of the first. Drawing on the parallels between composing and playing music and computer science (with empirical modeling as a tool), he provides a very interesting contribution to this book. Next the renowned cognitive musicologist Laurence M. Zbikowski explores the differences between the different kinds of consciousness (present when listening to music) and language. Similar to the stances of the embodied music cognition research program, Zbikowski suggests that musical materials have the potential to serve
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as an analogue of (human) motor movement (188). The abovementioned works of Antonio Damasio return in the eleventh chapter, written by Eric Clarke. Clarke distinguishes between Damasio’s ideas of core and extended consciousness (for a discussion about this and a role for constructivist approaches, see the discussion in Matyja 2011) and David Edelman’s primary and higherorder consciousness. Clarke is interested in the primary consciousness of music – i.e., the immediate perceptual engagement with music – although throughout the chapter, the author also discusses the variety of theories (found in (ecological) psychology of music) on direct experiences of listening. For example, Clarke (referring to J. J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception fashion) discusses the idea that: “music perception can be understood as adaptable attunement of listeners to their structured environment” (204). In fact, many scholars are interested in enactivism and music, such as Joel Krueger (2011) and Mark Reybrouck have also related to Gibsonian ideas (e.g., the musical affordances). In the next chapter, Alicia Peñalba Acitores, tackles issues directly connected with embodied music cognition. These include the importance of the body in two types of musical consciousness: 1 | the perception of an ongoing musical material in which the body is involved 2 | our higher-order (musical) consciousness – the capacity to become self-conscious of musical involvement. Following Edelman’s distinction, Acitores argues that both primary and higherorder types of consciousness are built on bodily inputs, and that the feeling of that body is possible through proprioception. In the last part of the chapter, Acitores offers her explanation of how musical consciousness occurs based on J. Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë’s (2001) sensorimotor contingency theory. In Chapter 13, Rolf Inge Godøy draws directly from the paradigm of embodied music cognition, analyzing so-called “sound–action awareness” in music, claiming that the awareness of musical sound can be understood in terms of awareness of sound-related actions. The very idea of embodied music cognition is that musical sounds are inseparable from bodily move-
ments. Godøy writes that we “…understand any sound and/or sound feature as actually included in some sound-producing action trajectory” (235). Any contemporary book giving an account of music and consciousness should also contain a detailed review of the basics in the brain of human interaction with music. The subsequent chapter by Katie Overy and Andy McGuiness serves this purpose, again with the emphasis on the embodied basis of human–music interaction. In this chapter, entitled straightforwardly “Music, consciousness, and the brain: music as shared experience of an embodied present,” the authors aim to investigate the neural basis of musical experience alongside the theories on the embodied nature of consciousness. Here, they define the experience of musical listening as a “shared subjectivity” – namely, the innate bodily responses to musical gestures. This chapter thus also consists of a broad description of the role of the human mirror neuron system in music cognition. The psychedelic effects of drugs (including cannabis) on perception and performance in music (with a focus on time perception in the process of performance) is discussed by Jörg Fachner in Chapter 15. He thus focuses on scientific studies and on anecdotal evidence provided by musicians and observers of musicians using drugs. On a similar note, Fachner’s work is followed by Chapter 16, which examines the musical facets of the special state of mind that is induced by ayahuasca (an Amazionian psychoactive brew famous for the vivid hallucinations it induces). In this chapter, Benny Shanon reviews and analyses the phenomenology of auditory and musical effects encountered in the special state of mind induced by this drug and its effects on music experience and musical performance. Shifting away from the issues of drugs and music, the last four chapter of the book fall into social philosophy and politics. The first of them (“Consciousness and everyday music listening: tracing, dissociation, and absorption” by Ruth Herbert) explores the range of consciousness occurring within the everyday experiences of music, thus offering a phenomenology of everyday listening. Next, Tia DeNora considers the role of music in consciousness formation understood from a pragmatic perspective, which fo-
Enactive Cognitive Science
Me, Music, and I Jakub Ryszard Matyja
cuses on consciousness as a form of creative work within its social and cultural settings. Chapter 19, “Public consciousness, political conscience, and memory in Latin American nueva canción” by Richard Elliott explores the impact of political movements in Latin America in explaining the ways in which consciousness (or “political conscience”) might be applied to groups as much as to individuals. The final chapter of Music and Consciousness examines poetic and musical expression from the psychological point of view. To conclude, this collection of papers offers a variety of approaches to the topics of music and consciousness. In particular, the chapters related to embodied and especially enactive music cognition (and ecological psychology) may trigger the interest of constructivists and lead to further explorations in this steadily growing field of enactive music cognition.
References Krueger J. (2011) Doing things with music. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10(1): 1–22. Leman M. (2008) Embodied music cognition and mediation technology. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Matyja J. (2011) (Just like) starting over? Review of “Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain” by Antonio Damasio. Constructivist Foundations 7(1): 84–86. Available at http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/7/1/084.matyja O’Regan J. K. & Noë A. (2001) A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 883–917. Reybrouck M. (2001) Biological roots of musical epistemology: Functional cycles, umwelt, and enactive listening. Semiotica 134(1–4): 599–633.
Varela F. J., Thompson E. & Rosch E. (1993) The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Varela F. J. & Shear J. (eds.) (1999) The view from within: First-person approaches to the study of consciousness. Imprint Academic, Bowling Green OH.
Jakub Ryszard Matyja is a PhD researcher in Philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland and a PhD researcher in Music at the University of Huddersfield, UK. His main research interests include embodied, enactive, and extended (music) cognition. Received: 8 October 2012 Accepted: 11 October 2012
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