From Things to Thinking: Cognitive Archaeology

Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace-based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive (including psychological, symbolic, and ideological) features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evolution, language, and musicality. We argue that the central epistemic challenge for cognitive archaeology is often not a paucity of material remains, but insufficient constraint from cognitive theories. However, we also argue that the success of cognitive archaeology does not necessarily require well-developed cognitive theories: Success might instead lead to them

Reflections on imitation, vocal mimicry, and entrainment

It is my contention that understanding natural phenomena such as vocal mimicry can bolster theories of the evolution of language and music as well as inform evolutionary and naturalistic aesthetics more generally. In this commentary I present this phenomena as a case study in order to stimulate further aesthetic theorising

Hominin Musicality and Musical Expressivity: Revisting Davies' Contour Theory

Stephen Davies defends an analysis of musical expressivity dubbed the ‘contour theory.’ In other work, Davies argues that hominin music could be as much as 500,000 years old. The musical expressivity debate is typically concerned with ‘pure’ (or ‘absolute’) music, taking examples from the Western art music canon as paradigmatic. I register some reservations about applying contour theory to musical expressivity in hominin prehistory, even though we might have reason to think that early musical activities were ‘pure’ insofar as they were wordless (e.g., utilising vocables, not lyrics) and not programmatic

Plio-Pleistocene foundations of hominin musicality: coevolution of cognition, sociality, and music

Today, music is ubiquitous, highly valued in all known cultures, playing many roles in human daily life. The ethnographic study of the music of extant human foragers makes this quite apparent. Moreover, music is ancient. Sophisticated bird-bone and ivory flutes dated from 40 kya reveal an even earlier musical-technological tradition. So is music likely to be an entrenched feature of human social life during the long passage to behavioral modernity—say, by 150 kya—or earlier? In this article I sketch an evolutionary model that focuses on hominin vocal musicality and communication in the Pleistocene, tracking between series of phenotypes and changes in ecological, social, cognitive, and informational contexts. The model links musicality and protomusic to a bigger picture of hominin socio-cognitive evolution, making some connections clearer, motivating further theorizing and the search for new evidence

Projects in cross-cultural music composition : a thesis and portfolio submitted to the New Zealand School of Music in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music in Composition, New Zealand School of Music

The creation of music cross-culturally is a rich, cutting-egde field in contemporary music studies. This thesis examines the practice of cross-cultural music composition through the lens of the tradition of Western art music and my own perspective as a composer representing that tradition. This portfolio comprises original compositions for various musical instrumentations including Indonesian gamelan and Chinese yangqin, and which utilise a range of technical and contextual approaches that are described in the thesis. Reference is made to historic precedents (mainly twentieth-century) including a case study of one composer (Lou Harrison), in order to give a context to my own work and musical thinking

Fictionalism about musical works

The debate concerning the ontological status of musical works is perhaps the most animated debate in contemporary analytic philosophy of music. In my view, progress requires a piecemeal approach. So in this article I hone in on one particular musical work concept – that of the classical Western art musical work; that is, the work concept that regulates classical art-musical practice. I defend a fictionalist analysis – a strategy recently suggested by Andrew Kania as potentially fruitful – and I develop a version of such an analysis in line with a broad commitment to philosophical naturalism

Music and philosophical naturalism

The philosophical and scientific explication of music is a cutting-edge field in contemporary academia. This thesis develops a naturalistic framework for theorising about music. The following novel philosophical positions are motivated and defended: a polysemy analysis of “sound”, conceptual pluralism about music, a pluralistic framework for approaching the science of music, and a fictionalist account of Western musical artworks. The adaptation/ by-product framework for couching discussion about the evolution of music is critiqued. A novel, co-evolutionary, niche construction model of the foundations of musicality and the origins, expansion and stabilisation of music is developed, couched in the general context of hominin evolution and prehistory. Conceptual and methodological reflection accompanies the evolutionary scenario developed