From sound to dispositions of musical action - functional, computational and ecological perspectives on music perception

 

Gefördert aus Mitteln der Fritz Thyssen Stiftung

 

Donnerstag, 4. November 2010

10.00 - 17.00 Uhr
DHI, Musikgeschichtliche Abteilung, Sala d'Ascolto, C-1

 

 

Programm

 

Die Reihenfolge der Vorträge wird zu Beginn der Fachgruppentagung bekanntgegeben.

 

 

Exposé

 

Music Perception is one of the key facets of musical communication. Research on music perception is one of the most dynamic fields in music cognition studies, in music psychology and in empirical and systematic musicology.

 

Depending on the chosen approach and level of exploration, a number of consistent methods and paradigms have been implemented that provide insights into music perception.

 

Functional and cognitive paradigms have been successful in explaining the structure, cognitive representation and time-based nature of music perception. Particular attention has been paid to the perception of tonal and harmonic structure and the analysis of aesthetic and emotional responses to music.

 

In parallel developments that have taken shape since the mid-1990s, (1) cultural and (2) bio-musicological and evolutionary approaches to musical listening have been enhancing our understanding of music perception by drawing attention to the manifold layers and associative richness of musical objects that become part of human perception.

 

Music Cognition Studies, too, have widened their research perspective and have been reviewing complex perceptual traces that cannot be explored by functional methods alone as in the case of a autobiographical memory in the field of music (JANATA). Similarly complex issues of emotional processing have been addressed in the new experimental aesthetics within music psychology that seeks to develop models of aesthetic appreciation during musical perception (SLOBODA/JUSLIN). Within these models, aesthetic perception is regarded as an affective process which is part of musical behaviour.

 

Researchers in Sound and Music Computing have addressed the overriding issue of how Sound is being turned into Sense from an multi-discplinary angle (POLOTTI/ROCCHESSO).  These computational studies programmatically expose “the hiatus that currently separates sound from sense and sense from sound” (smcnetwork.org/node/884).

 

It is precisely at this junction that the symposium seeks to intervene by giving attention to perception as a process in which cultural and social dispositions, knowledge forms and communicative expectations are implicated in complex ways. The symposium will seek to enhance recent approaches to perception that situate perception within the wider context of forms of action (i.e. aesthetic actions) and within forms of knowledge (i.e. aesthetic, situative, pragmatic, adaptive, procedural, interactive, gestural, embodied).

 

Moreover, the symposium seeks to lay out the frame for an integral and sustained enquiry of music perception that exceeds disciplinary approaches and concepts. By evaluating the heuristic potential of a musical material perspective instead of a mere sound perspective and by observing how music can stimulate specific dispositions of action and of knowledge, it seeks to provide a suitable starting point for discussions.

 

Here are some key questions:

How can functional and contextual methodologies be combined in order to achieve a richer understanding of music percpetion?

What kinds of knowledge are implicated in the process of music perception?

What consequences does a re-framing of perception as an active disposition have?

What is functional profile of the aesthetic actions supposedly generated by musical perception?

To what extent do media technologies and interactive environments affect musical perception and its analysis?

Die Abstracts erfolgen in alphabetischer Reihenfolge.

 

Nicola Bernardini (Padua): From sound to sense and from sense to sound: a roadmap for music research

 

Nowadays, there is a wide variety of techniques that can be used to generate and analyze sounds and music. However, urgent requirements (coming from the world of ubiquitous, mobile, pervasive technologies and mixed reality in general) trigger some fundamental yet unanswered questions:

_ how to synthesize sounds that are perceptually adequate in a given situation (or context)?

_ how to synthesize sound for direct manipulation or other forms of control?

_ how to analyze sound to extract information that is genuinely meaningful?

_ how to model and communicate sound embedded in multimodal content in multi-sensory experiences?

_ how to model sound in context-aware environments?

The same questions arise from the perspectives of human sciences and of performing arts: there is a consolidated tradition of a strong impact of joint artistic and scientific communities to science and technology developments. Experimental and electroacoustic music, as well as electronic and interactive arts contributed signi_cantly in the last fifty years: examples vary from pioneeristic visions opening new paths to research in multimedia to developments and consolidation of technological developments. From this perspective, new languages are emerging - e.g. in music theater, in interactive dance - in which a main role is played by the comprehension of perceptual expectations and engagement in spectators, of the multimodal gestural control of audio and visual content, as well as the understanding of the genuine core meaning of an »expressive gesture« in music as well as in movement patterns in a ballet/dance event. Therefore, answers to the above questions can be found also in a renewed vision of the »live electronics« paradigm of electroacoustic and experimental music, in new music and interactive art scenarios, in the framework of mobile, pervasive and MR technologies where a key issue is the physical participation of users in the interaction, communication, narrative processes. These directions are complementary to existing industry-driven developments of technology, e.g. in the home-consumer, MHP, and iTV scenarios, mainly enabling transaction-oriented applications. A consolidation of a parallel path in which experiments and explorations of new directions and visions emerge from such cross-fertilization of artistic and scientific research with medium/long term impact to the cited industry fields is required.

As a specific core research emerging and motivated by the above depicted scenario, essentially sound and sense are two separate domains and there is a lack of methods to bridge them with two-way paths: From Sound to Sense, from Sense to Sound. Until 2005, a number of fast-moving sciences ranging from signal processing to experimental psychology, from acoustics to cognitive musicology, had tapped this domain here or there without reaching a sufficient degree of generality.

In this context, the S2S2 project (EC-IST-FET 03774) was designed and carried out from 2004 to 2007 to reach the following overall objective: bringing together the state-of-the-art research in the sound domain and in the proper combination of human sciences, technological research and neuropsychological sciences that does relate to sound and sense. Ultimately, S2S2 created a research roadmap that extends well beyond the domain of sound and music computing to a more general concept of musical research. This presentation will illustrate the roadmap outlining its developments three years after publication.

 

Donald Glowinski (Genua): SIEMPRE - Social Interaction and Entrainment using Music Performance Experimentation

 

The presentation gives an overview of the E.U ICT FET Project SIEMPRE. SIEMPRE develops research theoretical and methodological frameworks, computational models, and algorithms for the analysis of non-verbal creative communication within groups of people, important also for future ICT (e.g. social media, on-line and mobile communities, web 2.0). Focus is on ensemble musical performance and audience experience, ideal testbed for the development of models and techniques for measuring creative social interaction in ecological framework. We focus on entrainment, emotional contagion, co-creation, each studied at two levels – between performers, between performer and audience - both during explicit communication process (e.g., between orchestra conductor and musicians) and during implicit synchronisation in emotionally intense experiences (joint music performance; audience live experience). Methodological framework will enable novel approaches to research challenges, including the integration in research teams of outstanding artists. Expressive Movement, Audio, Physiological (eMAP) multi-layer multimodal features will be extracted from participants using real-time, synchronized, multi-modal feature extraction techniques, and will be the inputs for theoretical and computational models. Major challenges and objectives include the following: key factors driving interpersonal synchronisation of participants; identification of specific roles inside groups (e.g., leadership, hierarchy, saliency); general principles concerning influence of individuals over others; factors that determine feelings of group cohesion or a sense of shared meaning; how eMAPs confirm the validity of reports by participants; how social context affects individual intrapersonal synchronization of eMAP and vice-versa; how emotion of the individual affects the collaborative creative product; neurophysiological foundations of creative group non-verbal social behaviour. A publicly available annotated database of behavioural data will be created and made freely available to the community of researchers.

 

SIEMPRE is an EU ICT FET – Future and Emergent Technologies, STREP 3-year Project, 2010-2012 Partners, Casa Paganini – InfoMus , DIST, Università degli Studi di Genova (www.casapaganini.org), Coordinator, SARC, Queens University of Belfast, Dept of Psychology, University of Geneve, MTG, Pompeu Fabra University, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).

 

Rolf Grossmann (Lüneburg): From sound to musical material

 

This part of discussion focusses the relationship between sound, actual configurations of composing / producing / performing / hearing music and the concept of musical material.

The changed technological and cultural conditions of music, i.e. the new »literacy of sound« derived from its technical notation, its digital coding and computing, broadcasting, digital networks, media installations etc. initiated new methods of composing and processing musical structure as well as new concepts of performance and reception. The traditional range of musical material (like E. Hanslick and Th.W. Adorno coined the term) which is based on settled melodic and harmonic forms does not cover many of todays aesthetic strategies. The lack of a satisfying musicological approach is accompanied by a wide discourse on sound culture in which music orientated questions and at least the term music itself have to find an appropriate position. In this situation it could be helpful to reflect »old« terms and rethink what makes sound become musical and what are conventionalised contemporary methods that could be the new material for music.

The material of composing and processing on the producer-side corresponds with extensive changes in reception. One proposal for identifiing the counterpart of musical material in the field of perception is the »musical concept« (K.-E. Behne) of individuals hearing music. The changes and extensions of this cultural »decoding model« are essential and should also be discussed.

 

Jan Hemming (Kassel): On different notions of musical experience

 

The title of Jimi Hendrix’ debut album »Are you experienced« (1967) is an ambiguous illustration of the various notions the term »musical experience« can adopt. Here, it simultaneously hints at lifetime experience and at artistic/aesthetic experience, to name only two. With respect to music, the latter may refer to conscious listening and a growing awareness of musical structure as well as an emotional experience. Thus, the different notions of musical experience are closely linked to the respective aesthetic concepts. I will set out with an exploration of the role of aesthetic experience (»ästhetische Erfahrung«) in the writings of Adorno, continue through reference to Dewey’s notion of experience as a means for promoting the development of a civilization and finally address empirical approaches to musical experience provided by recent music psychology.

Adorno, Theodor W. (1970ff): Gesammelte Schriften. Band 1-20. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp
Cook, Nicholas (1992): Music, imagination and culture. darin: "Experiencing music as form", S. 22-43. Oxford: Clarendon
Dewey, John ([1934]1980): Kunst als Erfahrung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Gabrielsson, Alf & Lindström, Siv (1993): On strong experiences of music. Jahrbuch Musikpsychologie, 10, S. 118-139.
Nagel, Frederik; Kopiez, Reinhard; Grewe, Oliver & Altenmüller, Eckart (2007): EMuJoy: Software for continuous measurement of perceived emotions in music. Behavior Research Methods, 39 (2), S. 238-290.
Panzarella, Robert (1980): The phenomenology of aesthetic peak experiences. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 20 (1), S. 69-85.

 

Sebastian Klotz (Leipzig): Beyond the functional paradigm: New perspectives on music perception

 

Over the last decade, research on Music Cognition has been relying on a functional model of acoustic stimulus/activation pattern in order to analyse the spatial and tempral nature of human audio perception. The acoustic stimulus was regarded as an item that would trigger respective responses in the human brain. It emerged that specific stimuli would allow researchers to capture specific dimensions of human audio perception, such as rhythm and metre, pitch and harmonic structure.

More recently, this functional perspective has been enriched by a wider understanding of music perception. Schema and protoype theories acknowledge that the perceptual process needs to be contextualised in a manner different from the rigid functionalist paradigm. Some researchers prefer to speak of attention processes during music listening. Different stimuli and research questions have been brought on the agenda, such as the issue of autobiographical musical memory which involves far more volatile materials. A similar case is research on extremely short listening examples that can still yield amazingly precise and informed responses.

The paper argues that this open situation in music cognition is an opportu­nity for music aesthetics, ethnomusicology and music philosophy as (1) the functionalist paradigm has been exhausted, and as (2) new research questions informed by other styles of reasoning can now be put forward to cognition studies.

Outside cognition studies, a wide range of models has already been formulated without recourse to music psychology. They (1) address music perception as an active disposition for action (Nicola Dibben, Ian Cross), (2) they put perception into an ecological perspective (Eric Clarke), (3) they draw on post-structuralist linguistics and cultural theory (Peter Wicke/John Shepherd) or (4) they develop a hermeneutics of listening as a kind of rewarding compre­hension (Matthias Vogel).

This paper will try to offer an integrative perspective as it sees musicology in general at a critical junction that deeply affects its research agenda, habits of cooperation and its standing within the humanities and the empirical sciences.

 

Elena Ungeheuer (Berlin): Musical action as an integrative research issue

 

There are several reasons not to restrict the term »musical action« to sociological and ecological issues, but rather to understand the qualities and modalities of actions and interactions as crucial subjects of musicological research in general:

1.) Sound's non-persistency evokes a huge variety of media for producing, storing, arranging, composing, performing and hearing music. These media include objects, techniques and cognitive constructs, amongst others. Their impact on music and the intermediality between them needs to be described pragmatically, focussing on media practices in musical contexts.

2.)  Many theories have already stressed the active aspects of listening music. Musical action is not only a question of producing music, but a basic concept also for a theory of musical reception that allows even perception to be interpretated as a form of action.

3.)  The analysis of networks is a method to describe given forms of interactive relations. Interesting perspectives arise through transferring the sociological issues of network theory onto musicological issues in the analysis of music, thus combining sociology and aesthetics.