Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

This introduction sets out the key themes of this special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews which is devoted to Music and/as Science. After identifying some initial provocative questions, it outlines the interdisciplinary, methodological and epistemological aspects of the various articles in the journal. It concludes with some personal reflections on the author's own involvement in music over more than fifty years.

Prior research involving persons with drug-resistant epilepsy has demonstrated that listening to some music decreases the probability of clinical seizures and their related comorbidities. This article reviews recent research designed to elicit the neural mechanisms behind positive outcomes on biomarkers of the disease. Using novel music analytical and neurophysiological experimental methods, our results showed positive effects on epilepsy using 15-second gamma-band (40-Hz) complex tones as well as Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K448). We also observed greater effects with increased stimulus duration. Further analysis elicited effects localized to bilateral frontal brain regions due to transitions between musical phrases. Finally, music matched for patient preference from a range of musical styles was not as effective as 40-Hz tones or Mozart's K448. Understanding these results required expertise in both music and neuroscience, and could yield reliable music-based interventions for epilepsy that may also be transferable to other brain disorders.

The music of English experimental composer Howard Skempton has been described as strangely simple in acknowledgment of its combination of apparent artlessness and subtlety. Drawing on foundational and more recent psychological research on music and emotion, Cavett explores representative examples from Skempton's approximately 140 piano miniatures, written from his student days in the 1960s until this year. She proposes that Skempton's music creates a sense of expectation and thus desire through the creation of pattern repetition that is disrupted, only to be later re-engaged with, creating gratification and a sense of being ‘in the moment’. Skempton then responds to Cavett's interpretation of his music from his unique perspective as the creator of the repertoire under consideration looking back across the trajectory of his creative career.

Tom Johnson is an interesting case of interdisciplinarity in that he makes music and mathematics coincide in a very obvious and literal way. He was led to this approach in the context of the American avant-garde of the 1970s, in which many artists tried to set artistic creation in the field of the impersonal. In using mathematics, Tom Johnson is in search for something that might allow the music to compose itself automatically. He establishes sequences of numbers and translates them literally into melodies, harmonies or rhythms. In doing so, he manages to make the mathematical background clearly appear. He seems to think of his music as a way of reflecting mathematics in the form of audible phenomena, and ultimately, he attaches some kind of mystical dimension to this experience. Mathematical truths, as he calls them, are unquestionable. Their laws do not depend on human will, they are deeply inscribed in nature, and a composition strictly based on them is necessarily linked to the absolute.

According to Brooks [2017. “The Big Problem with Self-driving Cars Is People”. IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News], artificial intelligence has had a variable track-record of usefulness in situations where context and environmental knowledge are responsible for shaping human interactions. In 2021, providing contextually aware training to supervised machine learning is still a non-trivial task for AI models that involve complex systems. In addition, knowledge held only across distributed members of a community, within culture, or tacitly within the wider environment of the ambient commons [McCullough 2013. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] evades consistent generalizable modelling – even in technical domains such as traffic flow management, atmospheric chemistry, or the prediction of election results. Yet it is precisely these interactions of context, community, culture and environment that also define how music can be created. The creative arts can themselves be thought of as a complex system. Assuming that creativity is non-generalizable, this paper assesses creative processes through a humanities-centric lens of machine learning and robotics, aiming to better understand relationships between context, environment and experimental system in artistic research. These relationships are now themselves significantly digitally mediated, requiring a change in academic discourse away from artefacts which need discrete research justification towards a more holistic, and often non-linear view of networks that require cultural situation. In doing so, issues of creative accountability [Field 2021. “Changing the Vocabulary of Creative Research: The Role of Networks, Risk, and Accountability in Transcending Technical Rationality.” In Sound Work: Composition as Critical Technical Practice, edited by J. Impett, 303–317.Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press] and the implications of substituting “creative question” for “research question” are examined within creative research. Early twentieth century ideas related to progressivism which have instrumentalized creative practice, particularly where technology forms part of art making, are challenged by re-thinking change through new models. The Three Horizons change model [Sharpe 2016. “Three Horizons: A Pathways Practice for Transformation.” Ecology and Society 21 (2): 47] originally intended to describe environmental ecosystems, is assessed as a practical tool for designing creative research.

In 1974 the composer Harrison Birtwistle commented to the author: ‘On film you can show someone at the bottom of the stairs and then at the top.’ This article explores the relevance of this statement to the compositional practices of Philip Grange. The focus is on Grange's Cloud Atlas (2009) for symphonic wind band, and how an adaption of the structure of David Mitchell's eponymous novel of 2004 is combined with a large-scale realisation of Birtwistle's statement to create a work employing structural eclipsing and narrative substitution that enables the 26 minutes of Grange's composition to suggest a duration twice as long. It forms the basis of a discussion involving Hertz's intertexturality to address the possible motivation for employing sources from other domains, while Jakobson's intersemiotic transmutation aids understanding of the processes involved. Finally, the desire to reveal non-musical sources is discussed using Eco's concept of ‘resonances and echoes’.

The authors investigate works by four composers who employed technology in the creation of music employing audification, sonification and algorithmic composition techniques. These compositions involve interdisciplinary collaborations either with scientific researchers, in the case of Annea Lockwood's Dusk and Carla Scaletti's hàgg, or artificial intelligence, in George Lewis's Voyager, and Bob Sturm's The Waters of Heanny. Each composer's choice of input data, custom-designed tools and personal compositional processes result in unique, expressive works that challenge the listener to expand their view of music and reality.

The article traces the author's research into auditory and temporal perception to probe the strategies useful to a composer for portraying illusions of multiple layers in music, then to a secondary exploration of cross-disciplinary terminologies and strategies, and subsequently to a focus on variables in the listener profile as influencing the potential discernment of meaning in music. Further exploration, tracing the millennia of primitive sound-processing strategies as well as the many contexts which involve body movements and rhythms, leads to the realization that a composer who ventures outside traditional stylistic conventions of music-making will benefit from attention to these factors. In conclusion, the author points out that music is created not only for portraying emotions and moods, but, like all art forms, with an infinite variety of manifestations, subject matter, and research modes.

The career of metaphor hypothesis advanced by Gentner et al, which describes differences in cognitive processing between metaphors encountered for the first time (novel metaphors) and metaphors encountered frequently (conventional metaphors), is applied to diverse relationships between instrumental music and the voice. A general account of musical metaphors hypothesizes that historical controversies over music's capacity to communicate extramusical meaning are rooted in the problematic conceptual metaphor Meaning is Content and may be allayed by adopting an alternative, Meaning is Mapping. Historical practices of modelling instrumental performance and composition on the voice (e.g. cantabile, The Singing Style) are conceived as conventional metaphors and various contemporary approaches to voice-based instrumental and electroacoustic composition are conceived as novel metaphors. A brief survey of contemporary practices illustrates some of the ways recent music has exploited vocality with examples from recent repertoire, and points of comparison between conventional and novel approaches to vocality are summarized.

The author discusses the relationship between experiential listening knowledge and scientific interdisciplinary knowledge in regard to sound, with particular emphasis on soundscape composition and electroacoustic signal processing.