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

Abstract

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.

Music Listening as Coping Behavior: From Reactive Response to Sense-Making

“…The latter involves mental operations that are at work in knowledge construction such as exploring, observing, measuring, labeling, selecting, comparing, recognizing, analyzing, interpreting, considering, choosing, reproducing, and modifying, etc. (see [ 43 ] for an overview).…”

“…As such, it is analog rather than digital in the sense of von Neumann’s original conception of computing automata, which he classified as either “analogy machines” and “digital machines.” The former are based on the principle that numbers are represented by certain physical “quantities,” such as the intensity of an electrical current or the size of an electrical potential; the latter work with the familiar method of representing numbers as aggregates of “digits” as used when we proceed with individual, non-mechanical computing by using integers [ 48 ] (pp. 292–294; see [ 43 ] for the analog/digital and continuous/discrete analogy). The outside-of-time experience, on the contrary, reduces the temporal unfolding to single representations or associations that work at a virtual level of imagery and that represent the sonic world without actual coupling with the minutiae of the particular temporal and spectral unfolding of the sounding music.…”

Music performance as knowledge acquisition: a review and preliminary conceptual framework

“…Positing such broader systems offers the advantage of transcending distinct performance categories, such as playing from memory or sight-reading. It opens up new perspectives for a multisensory approach to music performance by stressing the importance of the real-time experience of produced sounds ( Reybrouck and Eerola, 2017 ; Reybrouck, 2019 ). Not all experiences, however, are perceptually-bound, somewhat related to the ontological status of the temporal unfolding of the sounding music.…”

Action, emotion, and music-colour synaesthesia: an examination of sensorimotor and emotional responses in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes

“…Acknowledging the central role of action for perception and cognition, we recently challenged this perspective putting the potential role of sensorimotor experiences in music-colour synaesthesia to the fore (Curwen, 2020 , 2022a ). Music is known to present rich cross-modal sensorimotor associations including with action, and various sensory dimensions (Eitan & Timmers, 2010 ; Reybrouck, 2017 ). This paper investigates the relevance of such associations for music-colour synaesthesia presenting hypotheses for sensory and action-related phenomena as synaesthetic inducers.…”

“…Accounts of perception in typical music cognition have embraced embodied and enactive frameworks describing engagement with music from a sensorimotor perspective i.e., as an “act of doing”. Such views highlight the importance of kinesthetic experience and bodily based engagement with a material context for music cognition (Krueger, 2009 , 2011 , 2014 ; Loaiza, 2016 ; Maes et al, 2014 ; Reybrouck, 2014 , 2017 ; Schiavio et al, 2017 , 2019 ; van der Schyff et al, 2022 ). Scholars working from an embodied perspective argue that mental life is not well captured by analyses of mental states (i.e., their functional laws or computational underpinnings), nor by singular study of the brain’s structural and functional properties.…”