Cross-cultural representations of musical shape

In cross-cultural research involving performers from distinct cultural backgrounds (U.K., Japan, Papua New Guinea), we examined 75 musicians' associations between musical sound and shape, and saw pronounced differences between groups. Participants heard short stimuli varying in pitch contour and were asked to represent these visually on paper, with the instruction that if another community member saw the marks they should be able to connect them with the sounds. Participants from the U.K. group produced consistent symbolic representations, which involved depicting the passage of time from left-to-right. Japanese participants unfamiliar with English language and western standard notation provided responses comparable to the U.K. group's. The majority opted to use a horizontal timeline, whilst a minority of traditional Japanese musicians produced unique responses with time represented vertically. The last group, a non-literate Papua New Guinean tribe known as BenaBena, produced a majority of iconic responses which did not follow the time versus pitch contour model, but highlighted musical qualities other than the parameters intentionally varied in the investigation, focusing on hue and loudness. The participants' responses point to profoundly different 'norms' of musical shape association, which may be linked to literacy and to the functional role of music in a community

Beyond WEIRD and towards the decolonisation of music for wellbeing and health

Our aim is to identify an alternative understanding of music for wellbeing and health grounded in anthropological accounts of Afro-Brazilian music [9,10], and explore a theoretical framework and methodological implications that link this alternative understanding with 4E conceptions of irreducible ecology between body, mind and environment and coordination across multiple spatio-temporal-scales.WEIRD-based research conclusions have tended to endorse assumptions about music, wellbeing, and cognition that are couched in terms of individual-centred processes and internal psychological mechanisms. Anthropological accounts of, for example Afro-Brazilian music, present an important alternative understanding of music for wellbeing and health, namely music-as-health-establishing. The process of musicking in ritual and festival contexts establishes health in its maintenance and repairing of relationships (or ‘coordination’) with ancestors, each other, materials and environment (Daniel 2005). By foregrounding this holistic, ethnographic conceptualisation of music’s socio-functional connection with health, we eschew methodological and ontological individualism and seek to contribute to a decolonising research position in cognitive science (Smith 2013). Furthermore, we see a connection to unorthodox 4E approaches to cognition that emphasise the situatedness and irreducibility of cognition (not restricted to the ‘head’ and not separated from body and environment) (Loaiza 2016; Moran 2014). This connection offers a theoretical and methodological framework for joint advancement. Highlighting the relationships between coordination, music and health furthermore helps to understand how people can use their knowledge and heritage -as embodied in coordinated activities -to recover and reorganise their experiences of wellbeing. This has particular relevance in the disrupted context of the pandemic. Our critical starting point takes into consideration the interactions between dissimilar forms of knowledge and promotes marginalised knowledge about musical healing. Interdisciplinar

By myself but not alone:Agency, creativity, and extended musical historicity

In this paper we offer a preliminary framework that highlights the relational nature of solo music-making, and its associated capacity to influence the constellation of habits and experiences one develops through acts of musicking. To do so, we introduce the notion of extended musical historicity and suggest that when novice and expert performers engage in individual musical practices, they often rely on an extended sense of agency which permeates their musical experience and shapes their creative outcomes. To support this view, we report on an exploratory, qualitative study conducted with novice and expert music performers. This was designed to elicit a range of responses, beliefs, experiences and meanings concerning the main categories of agency and creativity. Our data provide rich descriptions of solitary musical practices by both novice and expert performers, and reveal ways in which these experiences involve social contingencies that appear to generate or transform creative musical activity. We argue that recognition of the interactive components of individual musicking may shed new light on the cognition of solo and joint music performance, and should inspire the development of novel conceptual and empirical tools for future research and theory