Topic – How does embodied music cognition augment our understanding of meaning-making in digital scores?

This was the third conversation in a series of trans-disciplinary discussions with experts from a range of fields to enhance the theoretical understanding of the digital score. The aim of this series is exploratory and openness so that we expose, rather than close, new insights that help us understand meaning-making in digital score creativity. Prof Dr Marc Leman’s starting point was a challenge: How does embodied music cognition augment our understanding of meaning-making in digital scores?

Among many invaluable topics and contributions these insights emerged as critical:

– The focus is on embodied interaction rather than isolating it to solely cognition

– embodied musicking involves 2 main components: patterns (of music and their hierarchies e.g. pitch, texture, harmony, form, rhythms) and expression (movements enriching the communications of these patterns)

– the bio-signals that emerge from music performance can communicate meaning to the observer

– when we watch and listen to music performances (as audience or as another performer) we can utilize the potential of empathy to be drawn into the meaning of the music and that which is being expressed

– the human can be biased {in most cases} towards predicting the bio-signals that we take in, from which feelings of satisfaction or surprise can help us to navigate {certain} meanings through the music

– musicians can embody the music through {among other aspects} empathy and prediction of the bio-signals and the expressive qualities of the patterns made into sound. Digital representation of this (e.g. robotic movement generated from captured human movement) may also affect us in this way.

– Like Walter Murch’s notion of “dimensionality” (Chion, 1993), the individual causes the music to happen: through their perception, cognition and embodiment of the music, they push meaning back onto the event, thereby becoming the agent of its creation (to that individual)