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

Abstract

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.

Affordances and the musically extended mind

“…Nevertheless, despite this existent work on ecological acoustics, the notion of “affordances” has not received much application in music cognition literature generally – although there are a few exceptions here, too (e.g., Gaver, 1993a,b; Reybrouck, 2001, 2005, 2012; Windsor, 2004; Clarke, 2005; Krueger, 2011a; Windsor and de Bézenac, 2012). As we will see, however, the notion is valuable within a musical context.…”

“…Reybrouck, 2012). Within this system, the listener uses music (via musical affordances) as a kind of “esthetic technology” (DeNora, 2000) for regulating and transforming their behavior, attention, and emotion.…”

Music practice and participation for psychological well-being: A review of how music influences positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment

“…Since sound perception has survival value for humans partly because of its capacity to activate various emotion induction "mechanisms," or "information-processing devices at different levels of the brain, which utilize distinct types of information to guide future behavior," Juslin (2013) correctly points out that "the emotions represent an extension of the perceptual process that enables us to infer not only the identity and location of an object, but also its potential consequences or 'affordances'" (p. 240, emphasis added; see also Krueger, 2014). Indeed, as Krueger (2014) recently argues in "Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind," "musical affordances -via soliciting different forms of entrainment -enhance the functionality of various endogenous, emotion-granting regulative processes, drawing novel experiences out of us with an expanded complexity and phenomenal character" (p. 1; for further fascinating discussion on musical 4 Musicae Scientiae embodiment and affordances, see Harrison & Loui, 2014;Hutka, Bidelman, & Moreno, 2013;Keebler, Wiltshire, Smith, Fiore, & Bedwell, 2014;Maes, Leman, Palmer, & Wanderley, 2014;Reybrouck, 2001Reybrouck, , 2005Reybrouck, , 2012Schäfer, Fachner, & Smukalla, 2013).…”

Toward Extended Music Cognition: Commentary on Music and Cognitive Extension

“…In his account, Leman draws upon both upon the concepts of affordances and embodied representations (for a critical review see Schiavio and Menin, 2013). There are currently many theories and critiques of the latter (see, for instance, Masataka, 2010;Tanaka et al, 2011;Menin and Schiavio, 2012;Reybrouck, 2012;Windsor and de Bézenac, 2012). It would be interesting to see how the application of extended cognition to music cognition affects our understanding of the concept of musical affordances.…”