Reybrouck. Axiomathes PDF

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MARK REYBROUCK
2 A BIOSEMIOTIC AND ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO MUSIC
3 COGNITION: EVENT PERCEPTION BETWEEN AUDITORY
LISTENING AND COGNITIVE ECONOMY
5 ABSTRACT. This paper addresses the question whether we can conceive of music
6 cognition in ecosemiotic terms. It claims that music knowledge must be generated as
7 a tool for adaptation to the sonic world and calls forth a shift from a structural
8 description of music as an artifact to a process-like approach to dealing with music.
9 As listeners, we are observers who construct and organize our knowledge and bring
10 with us our observational tools. What matters is not merely the sonic world in its
11 objective qualities, but the world as perceived. In order to make these claims oper-
12 ational we can rely on the ecological concept of coping with the sonic world and the
13 cybernetic concepts of articial and adaptive devices. Listeners, on this view, are able
14 to change their semantic relations with the sonic world through functional adapta-
15 tions at the level of sensing, acting and coordinating between action and perception.
16 This allows us to understand music in functional terms of what it aords to us and
17 not merely in terms of its acoustic qualities. There are, however, degrees of freedom
18 and constraints which shape the semiotization of the sonic world. As such we must
19 consider the role of event perception and cognitive economy: listeners do not per-
20 ceive the acoustical environment in terms of phenomenological descriptions but as
21 ecological events.
22 Key words: adaptation and adaptive control, cognitive economy, coping behavior,
23 ecosemiotics, enactive and experiential cognition, epistemic control system, event
24 perception, listenerenvironment interaction, musical epistemology
25
1. INTRODUCTION: FROM STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION TO
COPING WITH THE SONIC WORLD
28 This paper is about musical epistemology. It addresses the question
29 whether we can conceive of music cognition in biosemiotic and eco-
30 logical terms. The question is tedious, as music processing is a skilled
31 activity which is dependent on several higher functions of the brain. It
32 embraces activities as dierent as listening, performing and even
33 composing or improvising and oers an unrivaled opportunity to
34 investigate the neural correlates of skill acquisition besides unique
Axiomathes 00: 138, 2004.
2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Journal : AXIO SPS Article No. : 78 Dispatch : 4-3-2004 Pages : 38
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35 abilities as the recognition of absolute pitch or musical sight-reading.
36 There is a vast body of literature on the eects of music performance
37 as a skilled activity which requires the simultaneous integration of
38 multimodal sensory and motor information with multimodal sensory
39 feedback mechanisms to monitor performance (Gaser and Schlaug
40 2003). Several behavioral, neurophysiological and neuroimaging
41 studies have explored the highly specialized sensorimotor, auditory,
42 visual-spatial, auditory-spatial and memory skills of musicians
43 while performing motor, auditory and somatosensory tasks, and the
44 search for anatomical markers of these extraordinary skills has
45 resulted in ndings which are at least fascinating: there are func-
46 tional and structural dierences between the brains of musicians
47 and non-musicians which are illustrative of the neural plasticity and
48 structural adaptation of brain tissue in response to intense envi-
49 ronmental demands during critical periods of brain maturation
50 (Gaser and Schlaug 2003). Music processing, further, is also related
51 to language development, human communication, brain develop-
52 ment and evolution (Besson and Schon 2001; Gray et al. 2001). It is
53 legitimate, therefore, to consider the biological bases of dealing
54 with music.
55 Music, as a man-made construction or artifact, however, is
56 biologically non-relevant: there is no causal relation between the
57 music as a stimulus and any direct reaction to this stimulus. Music as
58 a physical stimulus or sound, on the contrary, is able to elicit
59 reactions which can be explained in physiological and biological
60 terms (Reybrouck 2001a; Martinelli 2002; see also the extensive lit-
61 erature on music therapy and biosemiotics). The reactions can be
62 either direct or cognitively mediated, with a gradual rather than a
63 qualitative distinction between the processing of sound and mu-
64 sic. It allows us to conceive of music as part of the sonic environ-
65 ment and of listening as a way of coping with this environment.
66 Listening, on this view, relies on music knowledge that must be
67 generated as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world and that in-
68 volves listening strategies which are the outcome of interactions be-
69 tween the listener as an organism and the music as environment. This
70 interactional approach is a core assumption of the ecological ap-
71 proach to cognition, and is somewhat opposed to the scientic per-
72 suasion that the world can be described in a language that is
73 incommensurable with our experiences. As such, it entails a transition
74 from a structural description of the music to a process-like approach
75 to coping with the sonic world.
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76 Arguing on these lines, we can conceive of the process of listening
77 as establishing semiotic relations between an organism and its
78 environment. This is an ecosemiotic position (for a critical denition,
79 see Kull 1998b) with the listener as an organismus semioticus (No th
80 1998) showing adaptive behavior in his or her interactions with the
81 music as environment (Reybrouck 2001c). The example of a musician
82 who plays a violin is illustrative at his point: in order to produce a
83 beautiful sound he relies on sensorymotor integration, shaping the
84 sound through the perception of the of the sounding result which must
85 match the internalized representation of this sound. Sound produc-
86 tion, on this view, entails the reciprocity of doing and undergo-
87 ing, as stressed already in the pragmatic philosophy of Dewey:
88 In short, art, in its form, unites the very same relation of doing and undergoing,
89 outgoing and incoming energy, that makes an experience to be an experience The
90 doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its
91 qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production. The artist
92 embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works. (1934, p. 48)
93 The reciprocity of doing and undergoing is typical of sensory
94 motor integration. This is obvious in playing music, but it applies
95 also to the process of listening, with the listener imagining or
96 simulating mentally the manifest movements of the players (see
97 Delalande 1984; Lidov 1987). There is, in fact, empirical evidence that
98 motor imagery and motor execution involve activities of very similar
99 cerebral motor structures at all stages of motor control (Crammond
100 1997). It allows us to stress the continuity between sensorymotor
101 integration and ideomotor simulation, the former dealing with
102 movements that are actually executed in real-time, the latter with
103 movements that are simulated at an ideational level of motor imagery
104 (Paillard 1994b; Reybrouck 2001b).
2. FROM CYBERNETICS TO SEMIOTICS
106 To conceive of music cognition in terms of coping behavior is an
107 epistemological position that deals with music in behavioral terms.
108 Several options are possible here playing, listening, composing,
109 improvising but the focus of this paper is on the process of listening
110 as a kind of interaction with the sonic world. This calls forth a process-
111 like approach to dealing with music which can be described in terms of
112 experiential and enactive cognition both terms will be explained
113 throughout this paper which, in turn, can be described in operational
MUSIC COGNITION AND EVENT PRECEPTION 3
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114 terms that rely on the concept of control system (see Figure 1). It
115 embraces the four major elements of adaptive control input, output,
116 central processing and feedback and provides a common language
117 for the description of adaptive behavior in general, leaning heavily on
118 the conceptual work of cybernetics and articial devices.
119 2.1 The control system as a starting point
120 Cybernetics is a unifying discipline which brings together concepts as
121 dierent as the ow of information, control by feedback, adaptation,
122 learning and self-organization (see Bateson 1973; Brier 1999a, b;
123 Cariani 2001a). It allows us to conceive of devices which behave as
124 autonomous agents which, according to Emmeche
125 [are not only] input-output devices, but [which] move around as cybernetic systems
126 by their own motor modules guided by sensors, making decisions, having the
127 capacity of acting more or less intelligently given only partial information, learning
128 by their mistakes, adapting to heterogeneous and changing environments, and
129 having a sort of life of their own. (2001, p. 659)
130 A central metaphor of cybernetics is the cyclic image of brain and
131 environment, with internal sets of feedback loops themselves having
132 feedback connections to the environment and being completed
133 through them (McCulloch 1989;Cariani 2001a, b). It is represented
134 in the basic schema of the control system, which is an interesting
135 conceptual tool that allows us to conceive of music users as devices.
136 2.2 The listener as an adaptive device
137 Music users can be conceived of as adaptive devices that are able to
138 change their semantic relations with the world (Reybrouck 2001c;
139 and for a general discussion of adaptive devices, see Rosen 1978;
Figure 1. The basic schema of a control system with the four major moments of
adaptive control.
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140 Pattee 1982, 1985; Cariani 1991, 1998a). They can arbitrarily choose
141 what kinds of distinctions are to be made (perceptual categories,
142 features and primitives), what kinds of actions are done on the
143 environment (primitive action categories), and what kinds of coor-
144 dinative mappings are carried out between their actions and dis-
145 tinctions. As such, they behave as adaptive systems, which, according
146 to Cariani (2001b), acquire a degree of epistemic autonomy:
147 adaptive systems continually modify their internal structure in response to
148 experience. To the extent that an adaptive epistemic system constructs itself and
149 determines the nature of its own informational transactions with its environs, that
150 systemachieves a degree of epistemic autonomy relative to its surrounds. (2001b, p. 60)
151 Adaptive devices can change the informational relationships with
152 their environment through altering the basic functions of sensing,
153 coordinating and acting. The sensing function can be changed
154 through modifying or augmenting the sensors. It allows the device to
155 choose its own perceptual categories and to control the types of
156 empirical information it can access through the basic mechanisms of
157 altering existing sensing functions or adding additional ones.
158 According to Cariani (1991, 1998b) there are basically four of them: (i)
159 prosthesis or adaptive fabrication of new front-ends for existing sen-
160 sors, (ii) active sensing or using motor actions to alter what is sensed
161 through interaction (poking, pushing, bending), (iii) sensory evolution
162 or adaptive construction of entirely new sensors and (iv) internalized
163 sensing by creating internal, analog representations of the world out
164 of which internal sensors extract newly relevant properties (perceptual
165 learning) (1998b, p. 718). The eector function, on the other hand,
166 can be modied as well. The device can change its eectors or coor-
167 dinate its actions with the sensing and coordinating function as in
168 active measurement. This is a process of acting on the world and
169 sensing how it behaves as a result of the actions we perform (active
170 sensing). It changes our sensing function without altering the sensor
171 structures, requiring only additional coordinative and motor re-
172 sources. The coordinative function, nally, mediates between
173 sensing and acting, realizing percept-action mappings which can be
174 simple reexes as well as highly elaborated internal schemes.
175 It is challenging to apply this to the realm of music and to conceive
176 of the music user as an adaptive device. Some analogies are
177 obvious: the construction of musical instruments and the whole ga-
178 mut of sound producing actions as an illustration of adaptation at the
179 level of acting, and the role of technological tools for better listening
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180 at the level of sensing (see Reybrouck 2004). But the topic of this
181 paper focusses mainly on the coordinating function of the control
182 system and the construction of better cognitive tools for listening. As
183 such, we should conceive of dealing with music in terms of making
184 sense out of the perceptual ux. What matters, therefore, is the
185 semiotization of the sonic world and the possibility to conceive of
186 music in terms of musical semantics and the related concept of epi-
187 stemic autonomy (Cariani 1989, 1991, 1998b, 2001a, b; Pattee 1995).
188 There are, however, constraints which shape the semiotization of
189 the sonic world. Listeners do not perceive the acoustical environment
190 in terms of phenomenological descriptions but as ecological
191 events (Balzano 1986; Lombardo 1987). As such, we must consider
192 the role of event perception and cognitive economy. Events and also
193 auditory events are continuous in their unfolding but discrete in
194 their labeling. They allow us to recognize an event rather than
195 experiencing its unfolding through time: as soon as we recognize
196 something as something, we stop acoustical processing in favor of
197 conceptual processing. The latter is much faster and less demanding
198 as to the eort of processing, as it is much easier to select and delimit
199 an events and to pick it up in an act of episodic attention than to deal
200 with it in an act of sustained attention. But which auditory events
201 should be selected for conscious processing? There are literally tens of
202 thousands of possible events in an average movement of classical
203 symphonic music (Fink 2001). These are at least as many as there are
204 notes in the score and probably there are many more of them. It is up
205 to the listener, therefore, to dene those events that are signicant
206 and eligible to function in the larger framework of a piece of music.
207 There is, of course, a lot of freedom here, but it is possible to reduce
208 this virtual innity to manageable proportions when we go beyond
209 the merely perceptual aspects of dealing with the music. This means
210 that we should consider an interactive approach to coping with the
211 sonic world which brings together perception and action as exem-
212 plied in the cybernetic concept of circularity (Arbib 1981; Jeannerod
213 1994; Paillard 1994a; Annett 1996; Decety 1996; Deecke 1996; Ber-
214 thoz 1997; Meystel 1998).
215 2.3 The claims of biosemiotics: functional cycles and the concept of
circularity
217 To deal with music in terms of coping behavior is a position that
218 broadens the scope of music. It allows us to encompass all kinds of
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219 music and sound, and to go beyond any kind of cultural and his-
220 torical constraints: music is a collection of sound/time phenomena
221 which have the potential of being structured, with the process of
222 structuring being as important as the structure of the music. As such,
223 it is possible to transcend a merely structural description of the
224 music in favor of a process-like description of the ongoing process
225 of maintaining epistemic contact with the sounding environment,
226 allowing us to broaden the descriptive vocabulary that yields only
227 static products which are not relevant to the music as it is heard
228 (Smoliar 1995). More promising is an adaptive model of perceptual
229 categorization which requires the negotiation of the ongoing activities
230 of delimitation, discrimination and association of objects (Edelman
231 1987, 1989). It enables the music user to perform mental operations
232 that go beyond mere identication and classication, and is helpful in
233 coping with the world of our experience, rather than furnishing an
234 objective representation of a world that might exist apart from our
235 experiences (von Glasersfeld 1991, p. XV).
236 In order to elaborate these claims, we can rely on the epistemic
237 control system (Figure 1). It is a rather old concept, which is
238 appealing by its simplicity it consists of the four major moments of
239 input, output, central processing and feedback and operational
240 character. It transcends the limitations of the mere reactive machin-
241 ery of an open loop construction by providing a cycle (closed loop)
242 rather than a chain both through the mechanism of feedback (closed
243 loop) and by the interposition of intermediate variables between the
244 stimuli and the reactions to these stimuli. As such it ts in with the
245 basic idea of a servomechanism, as pointed out by Wiener:
246 The present age is truly the age of servomechanisms as the nineteenth century was the
247 age of the steam engine or the eighteenth century was the age of the clock. To sum
248 up: the many automata of the present age are coupled to the outside world both for
249 the reception of impressions and the performance of actions. They contain sense
250 organs, eectors, and the equivalent of a nervous system to integrate the transfer of
251 information from the one to the other. They lend themselves very well to description
252 in physiological terms. (1961(1948), p. 43)
253 The role of the nervous system (central processing) must be con-
254 sidered here: being basically a system which transforms knowledge,
255 the nervous system can be dened semiotically as a system which
256 receives and transforms knowledge of the world so as to gure
257 out a way to change this knowledge to benet the carrier of the
258 nervous system (Meystel 1998). Much depends on the level of pro-
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259 cessing here: there is a dierence between the processing of infor-
260 mation at the level of the reexes as against the higher-level cognitive
261 processing of the brain. The latter call forth processes of cognitive
262 mediation, which color the input/output mappings by referring to
263 existing cognitive schemes which shape the listenerenvironment
264 interaction and which lead to the construction of an internal model of
265 the outer world (Klaus 1972).
266 A somewhat related idea has been advocated in the theoretical
267 work of von Uexku ll (1921, 1928, 1982(1940), see also Lagerspetz
268 2001) who introduced his key concept of functional cycle (Funk-
269 tionskreis) (see Figure 2) as a conceptual tool that describes the basic
270 structure of the interactions between a human/animal organism and
271 the objects of its surrounding world:
272 Figuratively speaking, every animal grasps its object with two arms of a forceps,
273 receptor and eector. With the one it invests the object with a receptor cue or
274 perceptual meaning, with the other, an eector cue or operational meaning. But since
275 all of the traits of an object are structurally interconnected, the traits given opera-
276 tional meaning must aect those bearing perceptual meaning through the object, and
277 so change the object itself. (1957(1934), p. 10)
278 The concept of functional cycle is an interesting conceptual tool
279 (Reybrouck 2001a). It can be considered as a simple, recursive loop
280 that links action and perception, and that has its origins in the con-
281 cept of the reex arc, with this proviso that the linearity of the
282 stimulus-reaction chain has been replaced by the concept of circu-
283 larity (von Uexku ll 1986). Behaviors, in fact, are not merely move-
284 ments or tropisms: they consist of perception (Merken) and
285 operation (Wirken), which are organized in a meaningful way and
286 not merely mechanically regulated. Rather than thinking in terms of
287 reactivity to an external environment, we should stress the role of
Figure 2. The functional cycle after von Uexku ll (1957(1934)).
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288 the organism as the subject of these interactions, and place emphasis
289 on the subjective, internal environment of the organism (Innen-
290 welt). Every stimulus, on this view, presupposes a readiness to react,
291 allowing the organism to select as a stimulus this phenomenon of the
292 environment which has been neutral up to that point.
293 Functional cycles describe the formation of sensorymotor
294 interactions, somewhat analogous to the idea of a neural feedback
295 loop (McCulloch 1946) in which coordinative circuits entail addi-
296 tional chains of interneurons interposed between receptors and ef-
297 fectors. This feedback loop, however, is completed through
298 environmental linkages with the outer world, allowing us to conceive
299 of functional cycles as elementary loops of functioning (Meystel 1998)
300 which consist of sensors, sensory processing or perception, a world
301 model, a commands generator, actuators and the world where
302 changes happen (Meystel 1998, p. 351). This is an operational ap-
303 proach which has gained impetus from recent research that stresses
304 the adaptive control of percept-action loops in articial devices
305 (Cariani 1989, 2001a, b; Ziemke & Sharkey 2001). It stresses the
306 ecological conception of interaction with the environment, and
307 presupposes an epistemic cut between an organism and its envi-
308 ronment in drawing an operational distinction between the input
309 (sensorium), output (motorium) and central processing as a kind of
310 sensorymotor integration which does the mapping and the coordi-
311 nation between them (Cariani 2001a, b).
312 The idea of sensorymotor integration, however, has its short-
313 comings. It deals with conservative behavior, which means that an
314 organism reacts to the solicitations of the environment in order to
315 achieve a state of equilibrium. This functional approach to inter-
316 action with the environment conceives of the brain as a controller,
317 which proceeds in real-time, relying on the mechanism of measur-
318 ing and controlling rather than merely representing the exter-
319 nal outer world. It is possible, however, to transcend this perceptual
320 bonding and to act as a simulator as well (Berthoz 1997). Simulation,
321 however, is not conservative. It proceeds mostly out-of-time and
322 leans heavily on imagery and internal dialogues, prompting us to
323 consider the role of internal modeling and the carrying out of
324 symbolic operations on mental replicas of the sonic world. The
325 main emphasis, here, is on the internal model of the outer world.
326 The concept of internal model is a central topic in von Uexku lls
327 work. It allows us to consider the external environment, which is
328 objectively there, as a part of the subjectively perceived environment
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329 or Umwelt of an organism. Such an Umwelt is the semiotic world
330 of organisms: it is a collection of subjective meanings which are im-
331 printed on external objects as a private subset of the world at large
332 (Kull 1998a). It consists of the interrelation actually a set of
333 mapping relations between the organism and its environment,
334 allowing us to conceive of it in operational terms as being the sum
335 total of the functional cycles which encompass all the meaning-
336 ful aspects of the world for a particular organism. They bring to-
337 gether the world of sensing (Merkwelt) and acting (Wirkwelt)
338 through processes of signication which invest the objects with per-
339 ceptual and eector tones. To the extent that these are represented
340 in the subjects inner world, they call forth a gradual transition
341 from cybernetic to semiotic analysis of the interaction with the outer
342 world.
343 2.4 Introducing the observer: the role of subjectivity
344 The act of listening is a process of dealing with the music which can
345 be described in terms of coping with the sounds proceeding in
346 time or out-of-time. It allows us to conceive of listening in epis-
347 temological terms as a kind of knowledge acquisition: as listeners, we
348 are observers who construct and organize our knowledge and bring
349 with us our observational tools, somewhat similar to the epistemo-
350 logical claims of Maturana (1978):
351 we are seldom aware that an observation is the realization of a series of operations
352 that entail an observer as a system with properties that allow him or her to perform
353 these operations, and, hence, that the properties of the observer, by specifying the
354 operations that he or she can perform determine the observers domain of possible
355 observations (1978, pp. 2829)
356 The central point in this approach is the role of subjectivity and
357 the way it inuences our reactions to the environment. Living
358 organisms, in fact, behave as subjects that respond to signs and not
359 to causal stimuli. This is a major claim of semiotic functioning: it
360 stresses the emancipation from mere causality and time-bound reac-
361 tivity to ever wider realms of spatio-temporal freedom and epistemic
362 autonomy (Cariani 1998b, p. 243).
363 This subjectivity, further, is not arbitrary. There are constraints
364 which can be found at various levels of coping with the environment.
365 According to Martinelli (2002), there is a basic distinction between
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366 three levels of constraints in coping with the world: (i) ecological
367 constraints such as being subject to gravity are shared by all the
368 things on earth; (ii) the biological level of constraints includes only
369 the living organisms; and (iii) the zoological level, nally, concerns
370 those aspects which are shared among the animals. Each of them
371 depends upon the others, with the proviso that we can conceive of
372 lower levels functioning without the higher ones, but not conversely.
373 Higher levels always involve the lower ones. As such we must dis-
374 tinguish between lower-level sensory processing and higher-level
375 symbolic functioning. It really makes a dierence whether we react to
376 stimuli which are presented to the senses (presentational immediacy)
377 or merely to their symbolic counterparts (representational media-
378 tion). The latter transcend perceptual bonding through a process of
379 abstraction from the sensory material, allowing us to deal with the
380 environment in the absence of sensory stimuli but at a reduced level
381 of acuity. The organismenvironment interaction, therefore, is not to
382 be described in terms of mere reactive machinery, but as a hybrid
383 process which combines both lower level sensory processing and
384 higher-level cognitive functioning.
385 In order to give an operational description of this higher-level
386 functioning, we can rely again on the already mentioned theoretical
387 work of von Uexku ll (1982(1940), 1957(1934); see Kull 2001 for an
388 overview). Especially his key concept of functional tone is interesting
389 in providing a workable conceptual tool for the description of dif-
390 ferent qualities or tones that can be attributed to the objects of per-
391 ception. The example of a tree can be helpful here: dependent on the
392 intentions that an animal or human being confers on it, it can have a
393 number of dierent meanings a shelter for a fox, a support for the
394 owl, a thoroughfare for the squirrel, hunting grounds for the ant, egg-
395 laying facilities for the beetle, a source of valuable raw material for
396 the forester which give the object a particular and specic func-
397 tional tone (von Uexku ll 1957(1934)). As such there is no one-to-one
398 relationship between an object in the outer world and its actual
399 meaning: each organism perceives the world through a network of
400 functional relations which constitute its own phenomenal world or
401 Umwelt.
402 The organisms Umwelt is only a section carved out of the envi-
403 ronment. It can be considered as the sum total of its perceptual cues
404 among the stimuli in its environment. It consists of functional cycles,
405 which operate by means of trigger mechanisms that select a number
406 of objects with special relevance to act as either perceptual or func-
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407 tional cue bearers. Both of them are related to each other in the sense
408 that the functional qualities aect the perceptual ones: they transform
409 the object of perception by giving it a functional tone. Our relation
410 to the world, therefore, is not merely representational, but is func-
411 tional as well:
412 We may say that the number of objects which an animal can distinguish in its own
413 world equals the number of functions it can carry out. If, along with few functions, it
414 possesses few functional images, its world, too, will consist of few objects. As a result
415 its world is indeed poorer, but all the more secure. [] As the number of an animals
416 performances grows, the number of objects that populate its Umwelt increases. It
417 grows within the individual life span of every animal that is able to gather experiences.
418 For each new experience entails a readjustment to new impressions. Thus new per-
419 ceptual images with new functional tones are created. (von Uexku ll 1957(1934), p. 49)
420 The critical element in this approach is the sensitivity to functional
421 characteristics of the environment. Animals and organisms, in gen-
422 eral, perceive objects in their environment in terms of what they
423 aord for the consummation of behavior, rather than in terms of
424 their objective and perceptual qualities. This is a basic claim of
425 Gibsons ecological psychology: aordances as he rst coined the
426 term are environmental supports for an organisms intentional
427 activities. They are subjective qualities that render them apt for
428 specic activities such as supporting locomotion, concealment,
429 manipulation, nutrition and social interaction for the animal (Gibson
430 1979). Translated to the realm of music this should mean that we try
431 to understand music in terms of what it aords to us and not merely
432 in terms of its acoustical qualities (Reybrouck 2001a). What is nee-
433 ded, therefore, is a description of the sonic environment in terms of
434 functional signication. Every listener, in fact, builds up relations
435 with the sonic world, selecting some of them to give them special
436 meanings. In doing so, he or she constructs a kind of sonic Umwelt,
437 which can be considered as a collection of subjective meanings that
438 are assigned on some elements of a specic subset of the sounding
439 environment.
3. ENACTIVE COGNITION AND THE INTERACTIONAL
APPROACH
442 The concept of Umwelt is appealing: every organism is able to build
443 up its own subjective environment by changing its semantic relations
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444 to the world. It is related to the modern concept of adaptive device
445 as an articial device which can choose or tune its sensors, eectors
446 and the coordinative mappings between them (Cariani 1989, 1991):
447 When adaptive systems construct their own sensors and eectors, they then deter-
448 mine, within limits, the categories through which they interact with the world. This
449 confers upon such systems a limited degree of epistemic autonomyin eect they
450 choose their own observables and modes of action. (Cariani 2001a, p. 261)
451 Adaptive epistemic systems interact with their surrounds through
452 action and perception. They build up semiotic linkages over time,
453 which evolve as the result of experiences and interactions with the
454 world at large. These linkages determine the categories of action and
455 perception that are available to the system, but to the extent that they
456 can be modied through the adjustment of sensors or sensory
457 motor coordinations the system can learn to make new distinctions
458 and create new observables. As such, it is possible to conceive of
459 epistemic adaptive systems and even listeners as measuring devices
460 that determine the external semantics through processes of selection
461 and delimitation of observables and through measuring of their
462 semantical weight.
463 3.1 Measuring devices, observables and symbolic play
464 The notion of measuring device was introduced by Hertz
465 (1956(1894)). He pointed out the possibility of linking particular
466 symbol-states to particular external states-of-aair: a measure-
467 ment is produced by measuring devices that interact with their
468 environs and provide a pointer-reading of an observable that func-
469 tions as the initial condition of a formal model for predicting the
470 value of a second one often the same observable at a later time or
471 dierent position in space. These pointer-signs reect the particular
472 interactions between the measuring apparatus and the outer world.
473 Given these initial conditions, it is possible to carry out predictive
474 arithmetic and/or logical calculations on the pointer-signs, providing
475 the formal part of modeling which is completely rule-governed and
476 syntactic in character (see Cariani 2001a). The role of symbolic play
477 must be considered here: formal computation is carried out on the
478 symbolic counterparts of the observables, and not on the observables
479 themselves. This is a major claim of symbolic functioning that has its
480 theoretical elaboration in the concepts of model (internal model of the
481 outer world) and strategic play (Klaus 1972). It reminds us of the
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482 older concept of the epistemic rule system (see Figure 3) with its
483 epistemic generalizations of homo sapiens, homo faber and homo lu-
484 dens. Each of these can be considered in terms of automata, con-
485 ceiving of homo sapiens as a perception machine (selection and
486 classication), of homo faber as an eector machine and of homo
487 ludens as a playing automaton (see Klaus 1972).
488 The latter, especially, is of paramount importance for the symbolic
489 functioning. It calls forth the introduction of intermediate variables
490 between input and output (Paillard 1994b; Reybrouck 2001b), and
491 raises the functioning of the rule system to a level that transcends the
492 reactive machinery of causal stimulus-reaction chains. Reactive
493 activity involves a direct input-output coupling sensory input and
494 resulting eectbased on a transfer function of a particular automa-
495 tism that is not inuenced by its previous history (Meystel 1998). As
496 such it is not tted for goal-directed behavior which involves deliberate
497 planning and mental simulation at the level of imagery. The latter is the
498 hallmark of the homo ludens as a playing automaton: it stresses the
499 possibility of internal dialogues and of carrying out symbolic compu-
500 tations on the mental replicas of the observables. In order to do so, the
501 player must have a symbolic repertoire at his disposal for doing the
502 mental arithmetic that is typical of symbolic behavior in general.
503 Applied to music, this should mean that we conceive of listening in
504 computational terms (Mazzola 2002), allowing us to lean upon the
505 conceptual framework and tools of mathematics, not in terms of
506 tunings and temperaments with mathematical models of musical
507 scales or working with note values (adding, ratios, fractions), but in
508 terms of mathematical activities such as counting, measuring, clas-
509 sifying, comparing, matching, ordering, grouping, patterning, sorting
Figure 3. The epistemic generalizations of the rule system (after Klaus 1972).
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510 and labeling, inferring, modeling and symbolic representation. What
511 is meant is an approach to mathematics which stresses the mathe-
512 matical experience (Davis & Hersh 1990(1981)) and the cognitive
513 approach to mathematics (Lako & Nunez 2000), rather than con-
514 ceiving of it in terms of ciphering and arithmetic. Translated to the
515 domain of music, this should mean that we can conceive of musical
516 objects and processes in terms of formal and syntactic opera-
517 tions which take place at the level of imagery. Music, however, is also
518 a sounding art, which means that the symbolic operations can be
519 helpful in coping with the sonic world without exhausting the pos-
520 sibilities of the process of listening as a sensor experience.
521 3.2. Experiential cognition and the concept of adaptation
522 Imagery and symbolic play transcend time-bound reactivity. They
523 call forth the introduction of an internal model of the outer world.
524 But which kind of model must we conceive? The question addresses
525 the topic of epistemic autonomy: are we constrained by the external
526 environment or can we change the relations with the external world at
527 will? The answer is not obvious since the music user can be considered
528 as an adaptive device which is capable of changing its semiotic
529 linkages to the sonic world.
530 The concept of adaptation is of primary importance here. It is
531 originally a biological concept, which describes the possibilityof an
532 organismto change itself in order to survive in its environment (Fleagle
533 1999). The claim, however, can be translated also to the realms of
534 cognition, as did Piaget (1977). Especially his concepts of assimilation
535 and accommodation are workable conceptual tools for providing an
536 operational approach to the mechanism of adaptation. The latter is
537 depicted schematically in Figure 4, with the left side symbolizing the
538 elements of the music, and the right side symbolizing their represen-
539 tations (labels) in the listeners mind. Several options are possible here.
540 At rst there is a matching (11 relationship) between the sounding
541 music and the representations in the listeners mind (Figure 4a): this is
542 assimilation, with the mental schemata being there, already installed,
543 and ready to be matched by the elements of the music. If, however,
544 there are more elements in the music than there are representations in
545 the listeners mind (Figure 4b), the listener must accommodate by
546 creating new representations. Once installed, however, the elements
547 and the labels match again (Figure 4c) and the listener has adapted
548 him/herself to achieve a new state of equilibrium.
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549 The concepts have proven to be fruitful. They have furthered a lot
550 of discussion and have inuenced profoundly the constructivist ap-
551 proach to knowledge acquisition in general (see von Glasersfeld
552 1995a, b), but above all, they provide a descriptive and explanatory
553 vocabulary for conceiving of an organism in terms of a learning de-
554 vice, which is capable of modifying its semantic relations with the
555 world. According to Cariani (1989, 1991, 2001a, b) there are three
556 possibilities for doing this: (i) to amplify the possibilities of partici-
557 patory observation by expanding its perceptual and behavioral rep-
558 ertoire, (ii) to adaptively construct sensory and eector tools, and (iii)
559 to change the cognitive tools as well.
560 It is tempting to apply this to the process of dealing with music
561 and to the process of listening in particular which we have already
562 dened in biosemiotic terms as coping with the sonic world. Lis-
563 tening, on this view, can be considered as a process of knowledge
564 acquisition which is helpful in the semiotization of the sonic world.
565 But which kind of knowledge do we mean? Can we rely on the
566 objectivist paradigm of knowledge which states that there is
567 something out there which can be known in an objective way or
568 must we take into account also the claims of non-objectivist cognition
569 (Johnson 1987; Lako 1988) which denes meaning in terms of hu-
570 man understanding? The latter highlights the dynamic, interactive
Figure 4. The Piagetian notions of assimilation and accommodation.
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571 character of understanding (and meaning) in terms of being in or
572 having a world, and stresses the experience of a common world
573 that we can understand.
574 In order to acquire knowledge, the listener must interact with his
575 or her environment. Our cognition is not reducible to naive realism
576 but has the mark of our cognizing with our minds (cognitive real-
577 ism): it is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges from
578 our capacities of understanding, that are rooted in the structures of
579 our biological embodiment but which are lived and experienced
580 within a domain of consensual action and cultural history (Varela
581 et al. 1991, p. 150). This is a cognitive semantics that accounts for
582 what meaning is to human beings, rather than trying to replace hu-
583 manly meaningful thought by reference to a metaphysical account of
584 a reality external to human experience (Lako 1987, p.120). As such
585 it is related to the epistemological claims of experiential and enactive
586 cognition (Johnson 1987; Lako 1987; Varela et al. 1991) which are,
587 in turn, related to the embodied approach to cognition (see below) as
588 a typical example of non-objectivist semantics. All of them hold an
589 epistemological position which has not yet received much attention in
590 academic circles, but which has been elaborated already in evolu-
591 tionary epistemology as initiated by Konrad Lorenz in second-
592 order cybernetics (Maturana, Varela, von Foerster), autopoiesis
593 theory (Maturana, Varela) and Lakos and Johnsons experiential-
594 ism (see also Brier 2000a, b).
595 3.3 Embodied cognition and the concept of enactment
596 The enactive approach to cognition is an epistemological position
597 which focusses on the realization of systemic cognition in the context
598 of the living systems interactions with the environment (Varela et al.
599 1991). Cognition, on this view, must not be considered as a recovery
600 or projection but as enactment on the world:
601 Cognition is not the the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is
602 rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of
603 actions that a being in the world performs. (Varela et al. 1991, p. 9)
604 Crucial in this approach is the grounding of cognitive activity in
605 the embodiment of the actor and the specic context of activity. It
606 denes cognition as:
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607 Embodied action that depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a
608 body with various sensorimotor capacities which are embedded in a more encom-
609 passing biological, psychological, and cultural context. (Varela et al. 1991, p. 173)
610 The role of contextualization and having an experience should
611 be considered here. It reminds us of the pragmatic philosophy of
612 Dewey and James who have dealt extensively with this topic. Dewey
613 (1958 (1934)) in particular has stressed the role of action and per-
614 ception and the reciprocity of doing and undergoing in the experience
615 proper. James (1912 (1976)), in turn, has introduced his doctrine of
616 radical empiricism, which is an original epistemology that deals with
617 the tension between concept and percept. It stresses the role of
618 knowledge-by-acquaintance as the kind of knowledge which we
619 have of a thing by its presentation to the senses rather than con-
620 ceptual knowledge. What matters in this empiricist approach, is
621 the fulness of reality which we become aware of only in the perceptual
622 ux (Mc Dermott 1968 (1911)). Conceptual knowledge is needed as
623 well, but only in order to manage information in a more economical
624 way. As such, it is related to the principle of cognitive economy.
625 The claims are challenging. They allow us to broaden our cogni-
626 tive structures from a classical to a transclassical model model of
627 categorization, with a corresponding transition from a conception of
628 meaning in terms of static, discrete and objective categories to a
629 conception of meaning as subjective, process-like and non-discrete
630 (Maser 1977). It emphasizes those categories of cognition that are the
631 outcome of perceptualmotor interactions with the environment
632 (Mazet 1991) and takes a position that restates the hypothesis that
633 there is a correspondence between the structure of our categories and
634 the degree of functional interaction of an organism with its envi-
635 ronment (Dougherty 1978). As such, it increases the range of cate-
636 gorization from mere perceptual to functional categories, integrating
637 both perceptual attributes as classes of action (Mazet 1991).
638 The whole approach ts in with the categorization theory of
639 Rosch (Rosch et al. 1976; Rosch 1978; see also Dubois 1991).
640 Especially her basic-level categories are workable examples here: they
641 constitute very inclusive categories a category as chair, for
642 example, is less inclusive than furniture, but more inclusive than
643 kitchen chair or living room chair which allow us to pick up
644 discontinuities, correlations, similitudes and perceptual and func-
645 tional resemblances. The allow us to interact with our environment at
646 a normal level of functioning. Properties, on this view, are not
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647 objective qualities of the outer world, but qualities which are
648 shaped by our interactions with the world. At this basic level they
649 seem to be objective to the extent that our bodies can interact
650 optimally with them (Lako 1987; see also Edelman 1989).
4. MUSIC COGNITION AND THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH
652 To conceive of music cognition in interactional terms is a position
653 which is related to the ecological approach to cognition. It stresses the
654 role of the interaction of an organism with its environment, which,
655 applied to music, should mean that we must conceive of the listener as
656 an organismand of the music as a sounding environment. But howcan
657 the listener make sense out of this environment? This is the basic
658 problem of maintaining ongoing epistemic contact with the perceptual
659 ux, which involves real-time processing and decoding of the sonorous
660 unfolding throughtime. Dependent uponthe role the mindis playing in
661 this process, we can distinguish direct from mediated perception.
662 4.1 Direct perception, cognitive mediation and the principle of cognitive
663 economy
664 The concept of direct perception is an ill-dened category which is
665 responsible for a lot of ambiguity. It is grounded in ecological theory
666 (Gibson 1966, 1979, 1982; Michaels & Carello 1981) which claims that
667 perception occurs immediately, without the mind intervening in this
668 process: direct perception involves direct contact with the sensory
669 stimuli, and the reaction to these stimuli proceeds in a lock-and-key
670 approach. As such, it combines continuous perception the sensory
671 stimuli are continuous in their presentational immediacy with a
672 symbolic representation that reduces the fulness of the sensory expe-
673 rience to a single cue, which has the advantage of speed of processing.
674 The ambiguity is related to the distinction between the stimuli which
675 are continuous, and the symbolic representation in the perceivers
676 mind, which is characterized by processes of abstraction, keeping
677 distance and polarization between the organism and its environment.
678 As such we should consider the possibility of a mixed discrete-symbolic
679 and continuous-anolog processing of the outer world.
680 The symbolic processing, however, has adaptive value as well. It
681 transcends the frame of the present and provides means for antici-
682 patory behavior in general. To quote Edelman:
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683 The development of short-term memory that was related to the succession of events
684 and signals consolidated the evolutionary advantage provided by an integrated
685 mental image, allowing the assignment of salience to events in terms of adaptive
686 values. But an animal possessing these means is still tied to a frame of the present:
687 although its behavior is undoubtedly altered by long-term changes in learning, it has
688 no means of reviewing explicitly its present perceptions in terms of analogues in the
689 past or in terms of anticipated analogues projected to the future. It has no direct
690 awareness and is not conscious of being conscious. (1989, p. 186)
691 Symbolic processing calls forth processes of cognitive economy. It
692 relinquishes the particularities and idiosyncrasies of the sensory
693 experience in favor of forms of conceptualization by which we can
694 process the incoming information in a more economical way. As such
695 it is an important cognitive tool that transcends perceptual bonding
696 and that allows us to do autonomous processing without peripheral
697 connection to the senses (Langacker 1987) and to go beyond
698 temporal and spatial constraints. It is closely related to the dierence
699 which was drawn by James (1912 (1976)) in his distinction between
700 percept and concept. It is possible, in fact, to conceive of either
701 sensory realia or their symbolic counterparts. It is reasonable,
702 however, to take a realist position as a starting point this is the
703 empiricist claim of perception which means that there really is
704 something out there, which is already structured in the environ-
705 ment. This is the ecological claim of direct perception which calls
706 forth the veridicality of perception and which allows us to speak of
707 perception in objectivist terms as well.
708 The same holds true for dealing with music. Music is a sounding
709 art which is actualized in its sonorous articulation through time and
710 which we can try to objectify by providing means for portraying the
711 continuous acoustic signal. Music cognition, however, is not reduc-
712 ible to this kind of naive realism with acoustical or auditory
713 listening as the only processing mechanism (Handel 1989). Making
714 sense out of the perceptual ux must go beyond a mere acoustical
715 description of the sound: what matters is not merely the continuous
716 ow of matter in the physical world, but the perceptual and cognitive
717 processes of the perceiver, which means that we must consider the
718 role of the way how human listeners structure the acoustic ow. This
719 is the basic tension between the bottom-up and top-down ap-
720 proach which draws a distinction between the sensory information
721 which is presented to the senses (bottom-up) and the cognitive
722 mediation of the mind, which applies discrete labels to the continuous
723 unfolding through time (top-down). Music, on this view, is both an
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724 experiential and a conceptual aair. We should consider, how-
725 ever, the economy of thinking which allows us to reduce the com-
726 plexity of the sounding world to major categories, which are not
727 totally arbitrary but which are ecologically constrained.
728 4.2 Musical semantics between ecological constraints and epistemic auton-
omy
730 Perception is ecologically constrained. It addresses the world not at
731 a physical level of description but in functional terms, stressing the
732 role of interaction between the organism and its environment. What
733 matters is not merely the physical world in its objective qualities, but
734 the world as it is perceived by the organism. This is the hallmark of
735 ecological perception, which studies the human cognitive and per-
736 ceptual apparatus in the service of survival and orientation in the
737 environment (Shepard 1984). As such, it is related to adaptive
738 behavior, which ts in with the claims of biosemiotics as an area of
739 knowledge which describes the biological bases of the interaction
740 between an organism and its environment (Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok
741 1992; Homeyer 1997a, b, 1998; Sebeok 1998). The role of interaction
742 is of primary importance here: a full description of perceiving cannot
743 be given by either analyzing only the organism or only its environ-
744 ment (organism-environment dualism). What is needed is an eco-
745 logical approach which is not animal-neutral but which treats the
746 environment as perceived.
747 The same holds true for listening to music (Neisser 1987; Mar-
748 tindale & Moore 1989; McAdams 1993; Gody 1999; Reybrouck
749 2001c) which can be dened in terms of organism-environment
750 interaction with the listener as the organism and the music as the
751 environment. Listening, on this view, is a process of picking up of
752 information which is considered to be useful. It can be subsumed
753 under the eld of ecosemiotics which studies the semiotic interrela-
754 tions between an organism and its environment (Kull 1998b),
755 encompassing the whole domain from lower sensory functioning to
756 higher levels of cognitive processing and allowing us to conceive of
757 the listener as part of an organismenvironment ecosystem (Michaels
758 & Carello 1981). Draw a distinction, however, between levels of
759 processing which are wired-in and which are acquired. This is
760 the well-known nature/nurture distinction, or the distinction be-
761 tween nativism and empiricism with its corresponding episte-
762 mological positions, which claim that knowledge is dependent upon
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763 innate faculties (the Chomskyan position) as against the construction
764 of knowledge as the result of interaction with the environment (the
765 Piagetian position). Rather than joining this debate (see Hargreaves
766 1986; Reybrouck 1989, 1997) I argue for a continuum between lower
767 and higher levels of processing, starting from a basically reactive
768 machinery which functions as lock-and-key with wired-in and
769 closed programs of behavior to levels of processing which are the
770 result of perceptual learning and cognitive mediation. The distinction
771 is somewhat related to the dierence between primary, secondary and
772 tertiary codes in communication systems (Bystrina 1983): primary
773 codes are of an innate nature (genetic code, perception code and
774 intraorganismic code), secondary codes are the result of a learning
775 process (language code) and tertiary codes operate at the level beyond
776 the secondary code (cultural codes) (see Jiranek 1998).
777 From a developmental point of view, it makes sense to build our
778 listening strategies on the grounding of primary codes, which are, in a
779 sense, our perceptual primitives. Most animals and men, according to
780 Cariani (1998b), have neural coding strategies that are used in the
781 representation and processing of sensory information:
782 While the particular experiential textures of things, their qualia, undoubtedly vary
783 among dierent vertebrates, the basic body-plans, sensory organs, and neural rep-
784 resentations are roughly similar. We see in dierent colors, hear in dierent frequency
785 registers, and smell dierent odors, but the basic relational organizations of our
786 percept-spaces in the end may not be so radically dierent. (Cariani 1998b, p. 252)
787 Arguing on these lines we can question the ecological claim of direct
788 perception (Gibson 1966, 1979, 1982) which states that perception is
789 possible without the mind intervening in the process of making sense of
790 the perceptual ux. Direct perception involves presentational imme-
791 diacy and launches immediate reactions to the solicitations of the
792 environment. As such, it calls forth conservative behavior which
793 proceeds in real-time. It is possible, however, to go beyond the con-
794 straints of time-bound reactivity and to interpose intermediate vari-
795 ables between the sensory stimuli and the reactions to these stimuli.
796 This is a basic claim of cognitive mediation, which seems to be opposed
797 to the ecological approach. It is possible, however, to conceive of both
798 of them, when we hold an ecosemiotic position which combines the
799 bottom-up and the top-down approach to music cognition.
800 This holds true for music cognition in particular. Listening em-
801 braces perceptual immediacy as well as conceptual abstraction. It
802 brings together continuous and discrete processing, stressing both the
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803 idiosyncrasies of the sonorous unfolding which is continuous and
804 the process of sense-making which can be intermittent in applying
805 discrete labels to slices of the temporal unfolding. Both approaches
806 hold dierent but complementary positions that depend on the lis-
807 teners perceptual strategies which are shaped by his or her interac-
808 tions with the sonic environment: what we are listening to are not
809 sounding things, but things as signs which shape our world. There is,
810 in fact, a whole machinery of semanticity and semiotization
811 which involves acts of selection and intentionality in the delimitation
812 of the elements we can mentally point at. As such we should conceive
813 of the sonic environment in terms of the listener doing the cognizing.
814 It is the listener, who can select at will and focus attention to things
815 and events which he or she considers to be interesting. This means
816 that perception is not totally constrained and that there is a lot of
817 epistemic autonomy in the way the listener builds up semantic rela-
818 tions with the sonic world.
819 4.3 Listening as a process of sense-making: principles of perceptual learning
820 and development
821 Listening to music involves a process of semiotization of the sonic
822 world. It is related to the ecological idea of organismenvironment
823 interaction: what the listener selects in focussing attention is not
824 arbitrary but is ecologically constrained. This is the ecological ap-
825 proach to perception which was advocated by Gibson (1966, 1979,
826 1982) who claimed that perceivers search out information which
827 becomes obtained information. They pick up information which is
828 already part of the environment and which aords perceptual sig-
829 nicance for the organism. In order to do so they must not lean on
830 senses which simply function to arouse sensations, but on percep-
831 tual systems which are tuned to the information that is considered to
832 be useful. Hence the role of key concepts as attunement, reciprocity
833 and resonance and the corresponding perceptual processes of detec-
834 tion, discrimination, recognition and identication. They remind us of
835 Meads conceptions about cognition as:
836 A development of the selective attitude of an organism toward its environment and
837 the readjustment that follows upon such a selection. This selection we ordinarily call
838 discrimination, the pointing-out of things and the analysis in this pointing. (1936, p.
839 350)
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840 There is, of course, a lot of freedom here, which provides strong
841 arguments against the classical information processing paradigm
842 which holds a functionalist and computational position that does not
843 encompass the role of the observer. To quote Brier:
844 It is the human perceptive and cognitive ability to gain knowledge and communicate
845 this in dialogue with other in a common language that is the foundation on which
846 science is built. To be aware of this will lead one to start in the middle instead of in
847 the extreme, not to start either with the subject nor the object, but to start with the
848 process of knowing in the living systems which is basically what second order
849 cybernetics do. (Brier 1999a, p. 86)
850 The reference to second order cybernetics is important. It typ-
851 ically conceives of the observer as a participant and as part of the
852 observed system, with a shift in focus from mere communication and
853 control to the role of interaction (see Pask 1961a, b, 1992; von
854 Foerster 1974, 1984; Maturana & Varela 1980; Luhmann 1990, 1995).
855 Translated to the realm of music, this means that we should consider
856 the role of the listener/observer. Depending on his or her listening
857 skills he or she can focus at will, but there are perceptual-auditory
858 triggers which are more salient and which impinge upon our per-
859 ceptual and cognitive dispositions with more pregnancy. We can
860 conceive of them as perceptual primitives which, in turn, can be
861 considered as universals in music cognition (see Brunner 1998; Kon
862 1998; Marconi 1998; Miereanu & Hascher 1998; Normet 1998; Pa-
863 dilla 1998). A musical experience, on this view, is not basically
864 dierent from an auditory experience at large. It is continuous with
865 the natural experience or experience proper (see Dewey 1958
866 (1934)) with a dierence in degree rather than in quality. This means
867 that we must build our listening strategies on natural strategies of
868 perception and listening with the transition from a naive listener to an
869 expert listener being a matter of learning rather than to rely on innate
870 faculties (Bamberger 1991). Listening, on this view, is not passive
871 registration: it involves processes such as exploring, selecting, modi-
872 fying and focussing of attention. As such it is related to the principles
873 of perceptual learning and development (for an exhaustive overview,
874 see Werner & Kaplan 1963; Gibson 1969).
875 The claims are not really innovative. They have been furthered by
876 developmental psychologists such as Piaget (1967), Werner &
877 Kaplan (1963) and Gibson (1969) but up to now they did not yet
878 receive the needed attention in music education. There is a vast body
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879 of research which has been concerned with the interaction between
880 perceiver and environment, but which has focused almost
881 exclusively to the domain of visual perception. It is tempting, there-
882 fore, to generalize from the visual to the auditory domain, if, at least,
883 we are dealing with general principles of perceptual development. As
884 such, we may conceive of listening as an active process of sense-
885 making, in which we try to replace isolated and meaningless elements
886 with coherent structural patterns which are characterized by articu-
887 lation, dierentiation and integration. These claims, which were
888 articulated by Werner & Kaplan (1963), remind us of the principles of
889 Gestalt psychology as advocated by Ko hler and Koka and can
890 be summarized by ve transitions which are typical of perceptual
891 learning at large: (i) the transition from syncretic to discrete, (ii) from
892 diuse to articulate, (iii) from indeterminate to determinate, (iv) from
893 rigid to exible and (v) from unstable to stable (Werner 1961; Werner
894 & Kaplan 1963).
5. EVENT PERCEPTION AND THE RECOVERY OF
INVARIANCE
897 The search for information is a major claim of ecological listening.
898 Purely auditory listening is quite improbable. as observers do not
899 perceive the environment in terms of phenomenological descriptions
900 but in terms of ecological events (Balzano 1986; Lombardo 1987).
901 Translated to the domain of music, this should mean that listeners do
902 not perceive the acoustic environment in terms of acoustical
903 descriptions but as auditory events. The claim is somewhat related
904 to the description of an auditory image (McAdams 1984) as a psy-
905 chological representation of a sound entity which exhibits a coher-
906 ence in its acoustic behavior. Auditory cognition, in fact, mostly
907 involves source-knowledge (Bregman 1990; McAdams 1984, 1993)
908 which is processed in a cross-modal way involving motor, kinaes-
909 thetic, haptic and visual, besides the purely auditory components. It
910 refers to the auditory source, the sound-producing actions such as
911 hitting, stroking, kicking, blowing (see Gody 1997, 2001b) and the
912 associated kinematic images and allows the listener to recover
913 invariant patterns over time rather than mere acoustic properties
914 (Handel 1989).
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915 5.1 Structural and transformational invariants
916 The extraction of invariants pertains to either static or dynamic fea-
917 tures of stimulus information. As such we can draw a distinction be-
918 tween structural or transformational invariants (Michaels & Carello
919 1981; Bartlett 1984; Shaw et al., 1996): structural invariants refer to
920 features that are not or only slowly changing, transformational in-
921 variants refer to styles of change (Shaw & Pittenger 1978). Both of
922 them underlie the perception of events which can be dened in oper-
923 ational terms as something happening to something, with the
924 something happening being specied by transformational and the
925 something to which something is happening by structural invariants
926 (Michaels & Carello 1981, p. 26). Transformational invariants specify
927 the change that is occurring in or to the object, structural invariants
928 describe the object by itself. Recognition of the sound of a clarinet, for
929 example, is a structural invariant, the specic articulation of the sound
930 is transformational.
931 The concept of invariant is an interesting conceptual tool. It allows
932 us to conceive of events as sequences of stimuli which are extended in
933 time and which can be described in terms of their invariants. They
934 behave as basic building blocks which function as units in perception
935 and memory. As such they call forth an ecological approach to
936 memory phenomena, which is related to the core ideas of event per-
937 ception: (i) the units of perception and memory are temporally ex-
938 tended events; (ii) the basis of perception and memory is the pick-up
939 of invariants over time; and (iii) perception and memory are essentially
940 veridical. These core ideas, in turn, are very similar to what is com-
941 monly known as the event perception hypothesis (Gibson 1966, 1979;
942 Bransford & McCarrell 1977), which claims that there is no clear
943 dividing line between the traditional domains of perception and
944 memory, and that the units of memory or perception can be greatly
945 extended in time. Events, on this view, are the appropriate units of
946 analysis, whether they are fast as in perception or slow as in
947 memory (Bartlett 1984).
948 Events, further, can be dened in an intuitive way as things that
949 happen, involving changes in objects or collections of objects
950 (Michaels & Carello 1981). It is obvious that the concepts of invari-
951 ants structural and transformational and of events are tightly
952 intertwined: the former act as a kind of glue that unitizes se-
953 quences of stimulus information into coherent events (Bartlett 1984).
954 They allow us to describe events either at a glance or in their temporal
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955 unfolding, providing both a discrete and a continuous description of
956 invariant patterns over time.
957 5.2 Categorical and auditory perception
958 Event perception calls forth principles of cognitive economy. It in-
959 duces categorical rather than auditory perception to the extent that it
960 relies on discrete processing in which the event is heard directly
961 with the acoustic properties of the sound being recovered only
962 from memory. In the case of auditory perception, on the contrary, the
963 acoustic properties are heard directly, with the perceptual events
964 being deduced (Handel 1989, p. 274). There is, in fact, a dierence
965 between the recognition of a sounding object or an event as a
966 discrete entity and the experience proper of its sonorous articula-
967 tion through time. The experience of time is critical in this distinction:
968 auditory perception involves real-time processing, categorical per-
969 ception relies on memory and proceeds partially out-of-time. Event
970 perception calls forth both of them. It can be described in a propo-
971 sitional way by specifying an event (E) perceptually when both the
972 transformational (TI) and the structural invariant (SI) are available
973 to be detected. An event, then, can be specied when the two-variable
974 function E(TI, SI) can be evaluated (Shaw et al. 1996). To give an
975 example: an event involving a bouncing ball might be denoted as
976 E(TI bouncing, SI ball) bouncing ball.
977 It is easy to translate this to the process of listening to music and to
978 consider event perception as a kind of top-down processing of the
979 music with schemata or labels which are assigned to segments of the
980 sonorous unfolding through time (Gody 2001b). It allows us to
981 conceive of musical events as higher-order variables which can be
982 described as having time-varying complex acoustic properties with
983 temporal constraints. As such we should consider the possible tran-
984 sition from high-frequency or high-resolution processing in the
985 range of about 10 msec to perceptual units in the range of 23 sec
986 which allow event identication over time (Wittmann 1999; Witt-
987 mann & Po ppel 19992000). Most musical events, for example, have
988 a clearly dened time of beginning and of ending and have a gross
989 temporal patterning as well (Handel 1989). As such they hold a po-
990 sition between invariance and change, allowing processes of
991 discrete labeling and categorization. Event perception, on this view, is
992 related to the problem of resolution. To quote Meystel:
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993 A nervous system cannot deal with the whole network of a particular level of res-
994 olution; it selects a scope of attention. At each moment of time, the nervous system
995 processes knowledge arriving externally and internally. In the meantime, the amount
996 of knowledge the nervous system processes is limited. No more knowledge is pro-
997 cessed than that which goes into our scope of attention. Within our scope of
998 attention, we cannot distinguish knowledge ner than the input resolution (smallest
999 distinguishable unit) our nervous system is capable of handling. (1998, pp. 348349)
1000 5.3 Categorization and the principle of cognitive economy
1001 Event perception is a core issue in musical epistemology. It stresses
1002 the role of the listener who is doing the cognizing. What he or she is
1003 hearing are not acoustic properties, but acoustic events which re-
1004 ceive signicance as the result of a process of semiotization of the
1005 sonic world. The events are evaluated as to their their semantical
1006 weight, which depends on the listeners previous and actual interac-
1007 tions with the sound. This is basically the constructivist approach to
1008 cognition (von Glasersfeld 1995a, b) which claims that knowledge is
1009 the result of a learners activity rather than the passive reception of
1010 information or instruction. It goes back to the revolutionary attitude
1011 pioneered by Piaget, who redened the concept of knowledge as an
1012 adaptive function, with the results of our cognitive eorts having the
1013 purpose of helping us to cope with the world of our experience,
1014 rather than furnishing an objective representation of a world as it
1015 might exist apart from us and our experience (von Glasersfeld 1991,
1016 p. XIV).
1017 The perception of events has adaptive value as well: event schemes
1018 are cognitive schemes wich are helpful in making sense of the envi-
1019 ronmental world. What listeners consider to be an acoustic or
1020 auditory event, however, is dependent on the way they schematize
1021 the physical structures in the sonic environment and on the way these
1022 structures are considered to be relevant to their adaptive eorts to
1023 succeed in their interaction. As such, we can conceive of music cog-
1024 nition as a schematizing process that ecologizes the stu of the world
1025 (events) either to render it more assailable by the organisms or to
1026 accommodate the organism to its environment (Shaw & Hazelett
1027 1986). Music cognition, on this view, is related to the principles of
1028 categorization with its basic characteristics of cognitive economy and
1029 the principle of reality. Categorization is a cognitive activity of par-
1030 amount importance: it stresses the importance of providing the
1031 maximum of information with the least cognitive eort this is
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1032 cognitive economy and allows us to render discriminably dierent
1033 things equivalent, to group objects and events and people around us into
1034 classes, and to respond to them in terms of their class membership
1035 rather than their uniqueness (Bruner et al., 1956, p. 1). This means
1036 that genuinely diverse inputs lead to a single output, without pre-
1037 serving the shape, size, position and other formal characteristics of
1038 the stimulus (Neisser 1967, 1987). As such we use categorization as a
1039 tool to manage a complex environment: it is fundamental to any sort
1040 of discrimination task and is indispensable in using previous experi-
1041 ences to guide the interpretation of new ones. Categorization, further,
1042 mostly starts from the assumption of an implicit ontological realism
1043 as advocated in the early work of Rosch on categorization (Rosch
1044 et al., 1976; Rosch 1977; Rosch & Lloyd 1978, see also Dubois 1991)
1045 claiming that the perceived world is not unstructured, but consists of
1046 real and natural discontinuities and co-occurrent properties. It takes
1047 the categories in the external outer world for granted, as advocated in
1048 objectivist cognition or objectivist semantics. But categorization
1049 does not deal with ontological categories: it revolves around
1050 conceptual structures which contain constituents dierentiated by
1051 major ontological category features such as thing, place, direction,
1052 action, event, manner and amount, smell and time (Jackendo 1988).
1053 As such, it brings together the claims of objectivist and concep-
1054 tual or cognitive semantics.
6. CONCLUSIONS
1056 In this article I have argued against the positivist position which has
1057 been taken for granted in traditional musicological research. Music is
1058 not merely something out there which can be described in an
1059 objectivist way. Music is a sound/time phenomenon which has the
1060 ability to be structured as it is heard. Hence the role of music cog-
1061 nition as knowledge construction and the role of listening strategies
1062 for making sense out of the sonorous ux. As such, we must consider
1063 an epistemological shift from music cognition as a structural
1064 description of an artifact in favor of music cognition as a process of
1065 maintaining epistemic contact with the sounding world. This is a
1066 position which prompts us to consider the transition from mere
1067 labeling of static objects to categorizations which are the outcome of
1068 an interaction with the sound. Hence the role of enactive and
1069 experiential cognition.
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1070 Cognition, however, relies on principles of cognitive economy and
1071 the same holds true for music cognition, which relies both on expe-
1072 rience and conceptualization. As such we must consider the role of
1073 categorization which allows the listener to cope with music in a way
1074 that is less demanding as to his or her cognitive eorts. Listening, on
1075 this view, is a process of sense-making that reduces the virtual innity
1076 of information of the perceptual ux to a manageable and limited set
1077 of perceptual categories which can be either discrete or continuous. It
1078 is a challenging idea to conceive of them as hybrid constructions
1079 which allow both a continuous and discrete labeling, and the whole
1080 domain of event perception seems to be very suited for this task.
1081 Besides, we must consider the role of functional categorization as
1082 well. There is strong evidence that the function of objects is a
1083 primary basis for the construction of concepts and for doing the
1084 categorizations. This is an idea which matches Piagets sensorymo-
1085 tor basis of early cognition, since the actions that we can perform on
1086 objects are primitive denitions in terms of function (Nelson 1977).
1087 What is meant, here, is a broadening of our cognitive structures from
1088 the rather limited linguistic categories to those categories that are the
1089 outcome of perceptualmotor interactions with the environment
1090 (Mazet 1991). It restates the hypothesis that there is a correspondence
1091 between the structure of our categories and the degree of functional
1092 interaction of individuals with their environment (Dougherty 1978).
1093 As such, it broadens the eld of categorization from mere perceptual
1094 to functional categories, integrating both perceptual attributes and
1095 classes of action (Mazet 1991).
1096 Translated to the domain of music this means that we should try
1097 to understand music in terms of perceptualmotor interactions with
1098 the sonic environment and describe the music not only in terms of
1099 nouns and adjectives which refer to perceptions of the envi-
1100 ronment but in terms of action verbs as well: the word chair,
1101 for example, means something to sit down or get up. As such, we can
1102 describe things in terms of their activity signature (Beck 1987). This
1103 motor element in categorization was already advocated in earlier
1104 theories of categorization (Rosch & Lloyd 1978) but the translation
1105 to the realm of music is still to be done (see Delalande 1984; Lidov
1106 1987; Reybrouck 2001b). What is needed, in particular, is a
1107 description of music in terms of its action aspect and to consider its
1108 activity signature in dierent descriptions: the sound producing
1109 actions proper, the eects of these actions, the possibility of imaging
1110 the sonorous articulation as movement through time, the mental
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1111 simulation of this movement in terms of bodily based image schemata
1112 and the movements which can be possibly induced by the sounds
1113 (Gody 1997, 2001a, b; Reybrouck 2001b). Sound producing actions,
1114 further, can be simple in their phenomenological appearance but
1115 complex in their sounding results (Gody 2001b), but, as a rule, they
1116 allow a kind of motor categorization of sounding events, which refers
1117 to singular (hitting, stroking, kicking, blowing) or complex or com-
1118 pound sound-producing actions (drumming a rhythmic pattern,
1119 sliding up and down a melodic contour). The same holds true for
1120 many metaphors which are used in talking about music (Gody
1121 1999, 1997).
1122 The whole approach is pointing towards a new area of research.
1123 Music cognition is not a special ability which is accessible only for
1124 gifted individuals. It is grounded in our cognitive abilities which, in
1125 turn, are part of our biological equipment. As such, it is possible to
1126 conceive of the biological roots of musical epistemology.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1128 I owe a profound intellectual debt to Peter Cariani who introduced
1129 me in the world of theoretical biology and adaptive devices. Our
1130 correspondence and his theoretical writings prompted me to seriously
1131 consider the possibility of translating his claims to the realm of music
1132 cognition.
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