Music and Semiotics: An Experiential Approach to Musical Sense-Making

This chapter sketches recent evolutions of semiotics as applied to music. Rather than providing merely a historical overview, it focuses mainly on the pragmatic turn in semiotics and the role of sensory experience in the process of musical sense-making. In order to elaborate on this experience, it delves into theoretical groundings of second-order cybernetics, biosemiotics, and ecological psychology, which are then applied to the field of music. Much effort is made to provide a broader framework to illustrate the transition from a disembodied to an embodied approach to musical semiotics. Special emphasis is laid on the concept of affordance and the role of interactions with the sounds

Experience as cognition: musical sense-making and the ‘in-time/ outside-of-time’ dichotomy

Musical sense-making relies on two distinctive strategies: tracking the moment-to-moment history of the actual unfolding and recollecting actual and previous sounding events in a kind of synoptic overview. Both positions are not opposed but complement each other. The aim of this contribution, therefore, is to provide a comprehensive framework that provides both conceptual and operational tools for coping with the sounds. Five major possibilities are proposed in this regard: (i) the concepts of perspective and resolution, which refer to the distance the listener takes with respect to the sounding music and the fine-grainedness of his/her discriminative abilities; (ii) the continuous/discrete dichotomy which conceives of the music as one continuous flow as against a division in separate and distinct elements; (iii) the in time/outside-of-time distinction, with the former proceeding in real time and the latter proceeding outside of the time of unfolding; (iv) the deictic approach to musical sense-making, which conceives of an act of mental pointing to the music, and (v) the levels of processing, which span a continuum between primitive sensory reactivity to actual sounding stimuli and high-level symbolic processing

Musical sense-making between experience and conceptualisation: the legacy of Peirce, Dewey and James

This contribution revolves around the concept of musical sense-making. Starting from the seminal works of Peirce, Dewey and James, it focusses on the musical experience, which can be defined from an empiricist position as a process that calls forth epistemic interactions with the sounds. Central in this approach is the tension between the richness and fullness of the musical experience and the cognitive economy of symbolic abstraction. Dewey, in particular, has stressed the role of having an experience proper as a kind of heightened vitality. James, on the contrary, has dealt with the distinction between percept and concept, stressing the role of knowledge-by-acquaintance as the kind of knowledge we have of something by its presentation to the senses. In what he coined as radical empiricism he states that the significance of concepts always consists in their relation to perceptual particulars, which, in turn, are embedded in a conceptual map. This map can be described in semiotic terms, which holds a symbolic approach to cognition to the extent that it is concerned with signs rather than with sensory realia. The question should be raised, however, as to the nature of these signs. There is, in fact, a critical distinction between internal and external semantics with signs referring primarily to themselves or to something external to the music. In an attempt to bring these claims together, it is argued that musical signs should provide a self-referential semantics for which the abstract is really material, a real semiotics of singular potential wich is grounded in the real and natural experience. Reying on some grounding work of Peirce and Morris and the relation between signs and tool using, a theoretical framework is introduced that has at least some operational power in going beyond a merely acoustic description of the music as it sounds

Neural Correlates of Music Listening: Does the Music Matter?

The last decades have seen a proliferation of music and brain studies, with a major focus on plastic changes as the outcome of continuous and prolonged engagement with music. Thanks to the advent of neuroaesthetics, research on music cognition has broadened its scope by considering the multifarious phenomenon of listening in all its forms, including incidental listening up to the skillful attentive listening of experts, and all its possible effects. These latter range from objective and sensorial effects directly linked to the acoustic features of the music to the subjectively affective and even transformational effects for the listener. Of special importance is the finding that neural activity in the reward circuit of the brain is a key component of a conscious listening experience. We propose that the connection between music and the reward system makes music listening a gate towards not only hedonia but also eudaimonia, namely a life well lived, full of meaning that aims at realizing one’s own “daimon” or true nature. It is argued, further, that music listening, even when conceptualized in this aesthetic and eudaimonic framework, remains a learnable skill that changes the way brain structures respond to sounds and how they interact with each other

Music listening as coping behavior : from reactive response to sense-making

Coping is a survival mechanism of living organisms. It is not merely reactive, but also involves making sense of the environment by rendering sensory information into percepts that have meaning in the context of an organism's cognitions. Music listening, on the other hand, is a complex task that embraces sensory, physiological, behavioral, and cognitive levels of processing. Being both a dispositional process that relies on our evolutionary toolkit for coping with the world and a more elaborated skill for sense-making, it goes beyond primitive action-reaction couplings by the introduction of higher-order intermediary variables between sensory input and effector reactions. Consideration of music-listening from the perspective of coping treats music as a sound environment and listening as a process that involves exploration of this environment as well as interactions with the sounds. Several issues are considered in this regard such as the conception of music as a possible stressor, the role of adaptive listening, the relation between coping and reward, the importance of self-regulation strategies in the selection of music, and the instrumental meaning of music in the sense that it can be used to modify the internal and external environment of the listener

Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach

This article is interdisciplinary in its claims. Evolving around the ecological concept of affordance, it brings together pragmatics and ecological psychology. Starting from the theoretical writings of Peirce, Dewey and James, the biosemiotic claims of von Uexküll, Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and some empirical evidence from recent neurobiological research, it elaborates on the concepts of experiential and enactive cognition as applied to music. In order to provide an operational description of this approach, it introduces some conceptual tools from the domain of cybernetics with a major focus on the concept of circularity, which links perception to action in a continuous process of sense-making and interaction with the environment. As such, it is closely related to some pragmatic, biosemiotic and ecosemiotic claims which can be subsumed under the general notion of functional significance. An attempt is made to apply this conceptual framework to the process of musical sense-making which involves the realisation of systemic cognition in the context of epistemic interactions that are grounded in our biology and possibilities for adaptive control. Central in this approach is the concept of coping with the environment, or, in musical terms, to perceive the sounding music in terms of what it affords for the consummation of musical behaviour.status: publishe

Biological roots of musical epistemology: Functional cycles, Umwelt, and enactive listening

Musicologie (OE) Academische lerarenopleiding Letteren.status: publishe

Music and Brain Plasticity: How Sounds Trigger Neurogenerative Adaptations

This contribution describes how music can trigger plastic changes in the brain. We elaborate on the concept of neuroplasticity by focussing on three major topics: the ontogenetic scale of musical development, the phenomenon of neuroplasticity as the outcome of interactions with the sounds and a short survey of clinical and therapeutic applications. First, a distinction is made between two scales of description: the larger evolutionary scale (phylogeny) and the scale of individual development (ontogeny). In this sense, listeners are not constrained by a static dispositional machinery, but they can be considered as dynamical systems that are able to adapt themselves in answer to the solicitations of a challenging environment. Second, the neuroplastic changes are considered both from a structural and functional level of adaptation, with a special focus on the recent findings from network science. The neural activity of the medial regions of the brain seems to become more synchronised when listening to music as compared to rest, and these changes become permanent in individuals such as musicians with year-long musical practice. As such, the question is raised as to the clinical and therapeutic applications of music as a trigger for enhancing the functionality of the brain, both in normal and impaired people