Abstract
A lot is happening in the field of cognitive science and music. The last decades have seen a real explosion of new areas of musical research. Cognitive, computational, empirical, and evolutionary musicology, biomusicology, zoomusicology, ecomusicology, cognitive neuroscience of music, music semiotics, music psychology, and music sociology are only some of the new emerging fields of music-related research. They are exemplary of an interesting evolution, which is typical of what Kuhn (1962) has coined as the “immature stage” of scientific revolutions. It is a stage which is characterized by considerable disagreement on principles, methods, and even accepted facts, and by the need of an encompassing unifying paradigm that puts together the distinct facts and conceptualizations as separate parts of a puzzle (see also Chemero, 2011). It seems justified, therefore, to conceive of a paradigm shift in music studies, initiated by several other more general “turns”, such as the “cognitive turn” in linguistics (Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1987; Talmy, 2000), the “sensorial turn” (Howes, 2006), the “pragmatic turn” (Bernstein, 2010), and the “enactive turn” (Varela, 1979). The cognitive approach, however, has been criticized for being too detached and disembodied, with a corresponding shift towards a more substantial role of the body in the mind (Johnson, 1987, 2007; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Thompson, 2007; Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). This growing emphasis on the role of the body in our cognition has found its way to a large amount of music studies, with a major focus on the musical experience, the coupling of action and perception, the role of embodied and enactive cognition, and an upheaval of studies of 4E cognition (see Reybrouck, 2021 for a broad overview). It is reflected also in the latest book project by Dylan van der Schyff, Andrea Schiavio, and David Elliott. These authors are good musicians as well as scholars with a considerable background in music theory, philosophy, and cognitive (neuro)science. As such, their book shows a nice balance between theoretical assumptions and empirical findings, with at times some educational and pedagogical claims, as well as interesting suggestions for musical practice.
Aims and Scope
Musical Bodies, Musical Minds (hereafter referred to as MBMM) must be situated within the broader enactive turn. It brings together new directions and avenues in music studies, and develops a “perspective on human musicality that integrates knowledge from across a range of domains, including the cognitive and biological sciences, developmental studies, pedagogical theory, affective science, philosophical traditions, various branches of music research, and more” (MBMM, p. vii). As the authors state, music scholarship over the last few decades has developed into a fascinating interdisciplinary field that looks beyond traditional interests, such as historical and formal analysis, to examine the psychological, biological, developmental, social, and cultural dimension of the musical experience (see also Parncutt, 2007).
This book ambitiously contributes to the interdisciplinary orientation that is so typical of current music studies, with a special focus on the embodied and ecological dimensions of music perception, cognition, and practice. As such, this volume connects in various ways with related and inspiring books by Clarke (2005), Borgo (2005), Cox (2016), Leman (2007), De Souza (2017), Høffding (2018), Kozak (2019), and Reybrouck (2021). Contrary to these related books, however, Musical Bodies, Musical Minds is “the first monograph fully dedicated to developing a comprehensive enactive/4E view of human musicality” (MBMM, p. vii). Its main position is that in being “enactive,” musical cognition is necessarily embodied, embedded, and extended: “musical minds are explored as active musical bodies that are embedded within, and that extend into, the social, material, and cultural ecologies they inhabit and actively shape or ‘enact’” (MBMM, p. 3). This is the so-called “4E” approach (enactive, embodied, embedded and extended), which is currently being developed across a range of research areas (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Menary, 2010; Newen, de Bruin & Gallagher, 2018), and which is discussed in this book with regard to its connections to ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory, and theoretical biology. But the scope of the book is even extended further by drawing from neuroscience, psychology, affective science, developmental studies, social cognition, philosophical traditions, and education. The latter, in particular, still needs a lot of theoretical and empirical grounding on the concepts of musicality and musical development, with a shift away from internalizing and rationalizing perspectives on human meaning making, in favor of new models and strategies to shed light on the embodied roots of music cognition. It is a way of thinking that reflects on music as a fundamental existential reality, with consequences for practices in music education, music theory, performance, and music therapy, placing less emphasis on internal pregiven or genetic programs, in favor of an understanding of how agent-environment relationships self-organize and develop over time (MBMM, p. 158).
As such, the authors provide not only an overview of existing theoretical frameworks, but they challenge current research and theorizing by arguing against the problematic “internalist bias” that locates music processing within the brain, in favor of a conception that spans bodies, brains, and the environments they are embedded in. It is a position that emphasizes the active role of human agents (e.g., listeners, performers) in shaping their engagements with musical environments by entraining and resonating with extended musical environments to better address the social, developmental, embodied, ecological, and active-creative dimensions of the musical experience in a more dynamic and enactive way (MBMM, p. 102).
The book as a whole, finally, delves deeply into the terminological and philosophical roots of the enactive approach to musical cognition. This is especially appealing for students new to the field of music cognition and music psychology, who may find the book interesting as a first comprehensive overview of many distinct fields that are brought together in a coherent way. It provides a lot of theoretical overviews and elaborates in depth on topics that are covered rather tangentially in related books and contributions.
Contents
Musical Bodies, Musical Minds, obviously, is about the body and the mind. It reports abundantly about new insights into the nature of the human mind, bringing in current research in cognitive science, with as a major tenet, the growing conviction that traditional models of cognition as information processing confined to the brain – the “mind-as-computer” model – are no longer appropriate. The enactive perspective, which is put forward as its most likely alternative, traces a deep continuity between biological, corporeal, and mental processes with a central role for the active, situated, living body for cognition. It is a conception that goes beyond the boundaries of “skin and skull” (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008). The book, therefore, explores fundamental questions by extending the enactive perspective into areas such as musical consciousness, phenomenology and its relation to the musical body, musical emotion and empathy, music and human evolution, early musical development, musical creativity, and music pedagogy.
The overall structure of the book is quite coherent, with 10 chapters that revolve around the basic principles of enactive cognitive science. It is a perspective that examines musical development in terms of a continuity between action and perception, with musical growth not blindly adhering to a predetermined developmental trajectory, but as a “synergistic process that involves the reciprocal interaction of bodily, environmental, genetic, biological, sociocultural, and technological factors” (MBMM, p. 158). Here is the table of contents:
Getting Situated Basic Principles of Enactive Cognitive Science Music and Consciousness Phenomenology and the Musical Body Music and Emotion The Empathic Connection The Evolution of the Musical Mind Teleomusicality Creative Musical Bodies Praxis
As evidenced by this chapter overview, several theoretical frameworks are brought together, to mention only principles of ecological psychology, enactive cognition, and action and perception studies. Several topics are addressed, such as perception and affordances, dynamic systems theory, 4E cognition, interaction theory, embodied simulation theory, emotional and cognitive empathy, empathic space, autopoiesis and operational closure, the therapeutic nature of the musical experience, musical scaffolding, musical creativity, teleomusicality, participatory sense-making, social cognition, the biocultural hypothesis on musicality, qualia, and the phenomenal attitude in musical engagements.
Some of the contents are quite challenging and appealing. Delving deeply into the field of ecological psychology and its opposition to representational and computational approaches, the book draws also on research in neuroscience, biology, and dynamic systems theory and current trends in developmental science, affective science, and evolutionary theory. As such, it aligns itself with scholars who counter the still dominant computational model of the mind (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), replacing it with a continuity between life and mind, between biological and mental processes (Thompson, 2007) and relying substantially on the claims of radical embodied cognitive science (Chemero, 2011).
The book, moreover, is not merely about music. It has a wider scope, by drawing broadly on dynamical perspectives (dynamic systems theory) as well as the recently developed 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) framework in an attempt to describe the self-organizing and participatory sense-making processes (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007; Torrance & Froese, 2011) that are associated with an enactive music cognition approach.
The concept of self-organization is borrowed from Varela's previous work on biological autonomy (Varela, 1979) and Maturana's and Varela's concept of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1980, 1984). The meaning of the term is not easy to grasp. However, the authors explain the term in quite intuitive terms: Living systems bring themselves into existence and actively participate in their own continuation. Such systems are understood to be autonomous because the world of significance that is brought forth through such processes is not externally imposed but arises from the system's own self-organizing activity. A living system is not “made,” nor is it best understood as a “thing.” It is, rather, “a process with the particular property of engendering itself indefinitely” (…). This process involves cycles of reproduction, whereby the components of the living system are constantly self-generated so that the organism can maintain itself within the demands of a contingent environment. Such processes are referred to as “autopoiesis” (literally, “self-making”), the most fundamental example of which can be found in the living cell. (MBMM, p. 29)
As can be seen from these examples, the book is very rich in content with a multiplicity of perspectives and overviews, historical digressions, and broader theoretical reflections and in-depth elaborations of specific technical matters.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Musical Bodies, Musical Minds has a long history and is to some extent the further elaboration of insights and positions that have been published already in previous peer-reviewed papers. The findings are now updated and presented in a book format, which significantly contributes to the coherence of contents that were first presented as more disparate findings. As a whole, the book is well written, with good readability and high academic standards, even if the contents are not always easy to grasp. The broader philosophical background is quite interesting, but is not always simple to understand, though the clear descriptions are quite helpful here. Readers not familiar with philosophy of mind will find the book quite useful as a first introduction to the field.
The readability of the book, moreover, is not equal throughout the volume, as there are three authors with different writing styles. The overall picture, however, is quite coherent. Some chapters are rather abstract and difficult to read, others are also somewhat polemic, especially when discussing issues of music education as aesthetic education, and digressions about ethical music education and existential implications, though this does no harm. More references to recent findings in the domain of neuroesthetics, however, should have been welcomed here (Brattico, 2020; Chatterjee, 2010, Chatterjee & Vartanian, 2016; Leder, 2013; Pearce et al., 2016; Reybrouck et al., 2021). The authors, moreover, are passionate in their attempts to provide the much-needed theoretical and empirical grounding for the field of music education. In doing this, they are sometimes eager to try to convince or to prove too much by taking a rather radical stance towards the enactivist approach. There is, at some places in the book, a danger of bigotry with new insights (such as 4E cognition and the enactivist orientation in particular) and a corresponding tendency to try to impose them somewhat forcefully. This is a legitimate approach, but taking some more distance should still improve the academic standards of the book. It is a major merit, however, that the book is programmatic and not merely descriptive. It proposes several new perspectives for future implementations of “enhanced” engagement with the music.
Compared to other volumes on embodied/enactive science and music, this book is quite understandable, with intuitive and in-depth descriptions of difficult topics such as enaction, autopoiesis, structural coupling, self-organization, and dynamic systems. Many terms are introduced and explained, and abundant suggestions for further reading are offered. A major strength is that the theoretical, abstract claims are interspersed with lots of concrete examples so as to make reading more appealing and understandable. The insertion of some inspiring and illuminating figures also enhances readability.
The style of writing is fluent with provoking starting questions and claims that are quite recognizable to the interested reader. Here is an example: Even the most accurate quantitative analysis of the sound waves created by a performance cannot fully capture the listener's subjective experience of it. In other words, the correlation between the physical attributes of a musical sound (e.g., its timbre, its duration, amplitude changes) and the feeling it evokes, does not appear to admit any direct causal claim: the same stimulus (or stimuli) could potentially generate different experiences in other perceivers, or even in the same perceiver over time or in a different context. (MBMM, p. 56).
The contents of the book are well balanced with interesting historical and philosophical digressions together with lots of empirical findings and musical applications. The central focus of the book – musical body, musical mind – moreover, is timely, given the growing attention to embodied and enactive cognition, not least in the domain of music. The authors, moreover, demonstrate a mature style of writing. They not only bring together existing knowledge from divergent fields; they also go beyond the limitations of much previous theoretical and empirical research by providing thought-provoking new avenues and proposals, such as a more dynamical and enactive perspective on musical emotions and a refreshing approach to the active-creative dimensions of the musical experience.
The major strength of this book, however, is its interdisciplinary approach, but this is also its major challenge. It is not easy to present a coherent picture of insights from fields so divergent as music, biology, ecological psychology, developmental science, affective science, neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and dynamic systems theory. Readers not familiar with these domains may find the book useful as a first introduction, but even if the contents are described in a clear and readable way, the book is not easy to read. There are lots of concepts, especially those from the field of dynamic systems theory and from the broader philosophical field, which are quite abstract and not easy to understand at first reading. Examples are the concepts of autopoiesis, structural coupling, operational closure, self-organizing processes, autonomy, musical ecologies, phronesis, qualia, second- and third wave perspective on the extended mind thesis, and many others. Most of these concepts are explained quite clearly, but even if they are explained in an understandable way, some background knowledge from the reader is still needed to fully understand them. The multiple footnotes and the index at the end of the book are of great help in this regard, and the authors also provide an impressive list of references, which are not used in a cosmetic way but which are thoroughly covered, and which can be used for further reading. The elaborated footnotes, in particular, provide many substantial in-depth elaborations without necessarily hampering the rhythm of reading. They make the book appealing also for scholars familiar with the field.
In sum, this is an interesting book. It provides a lot of new information as well as strong arguments against disembodied models of musical sense-making, with a lot of facts and a nuanced approach to their flaws and assumed weaknesses. The book, therefore, is not just a theoretical exercise, by providing beautiful frameworks and overviews. It also opens up new avenues for future research on musical learning, development and creativity, not in terms of products or cognitive processes, but in terms of bodily and interactive aspects. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the ideas offered in this book will inspire new approaches and ways of thinking about the nature and meaning of human musicality which align closely with the actual experience of music in human life.
