Musical Sense Making

Musical Sense-Making: Enaction, Experience, and Computation broadens the scope of musical sense-making from a disembodied cognitivist approach to an experiential approach. Revolving around the definition of music as a temporal and sounding art, it argues for an interactional and experiential approach that brings together the richness of sensory experience and principles of cognitive economy. Starting from the major distinction between in-time and outside-of-time processing of the sounds, this volume provides a conceptual and operational framework for dealing with sounds in a real-time listening situation, relying heavily on the theoretical groundings of ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory, and stressing the role of epistemic interactions with the sounds. These interactions are considered from different perspectives, bringing together insights from previous theoretical groundings and more recent empirical research. The author’s findings are framed within the context of the broader field of enactive and embodied cognition, recent action and perception studies, and the emerging field of neurophenomenology and dynamical systems theory. This volume will particularly appeal to scholars and researchers interested in the intersection between music, philosophy, and/or psychology.

Musical Sense-Making: Enaction, Experience, and Computation broadens the scope of musical sense-making from a disembodied cognitivist approach to an experiential approach. Revolving around the definition of music as a temporal and sounding art, it argues for an interactional and experiential approach that brings together the richness of sensory experience and principles of cognitive economy. Starting from the major distinction between in-time and outside-of-time processing of the sounds, this volume provides a conceptual and operational framework for dealing with sounds in a real-time listening situation, relying heavily on the theoretical groundings of ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory, and stressing the role of epistemic interactions with the sounds. These interactions are considered from different perspectives, bringing together insights from previous theoretical groundings and more recent empirical research. The author’s findings are framed within the context of the broader field of enactive and embodied cognition, recent action and perception studies, and the emerging field of neurophenomenology and dynamical systems theory. This volume will particularly appeal to scholars and researchers interested in the intersection between music, philosophy, and/or psychology.

The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject. Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification. This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.

The book has three main sections: Part One deals with core musical experiences, Part Two offers extension activities and alternative contexts, and Part Three examines the challenge of assessment in the arts.

The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous—and enormously influential—dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange. Ruth Katz argues that the indispensible relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process, in turn, shaped the art form itself. As ideas entered music from the contexts in which it existed, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years. A magisterial exploration of a frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.

Building on ideas from cognitive metaphor theory, Making Sense of Recordings offers a new perspective on record production, music perception, and the aesthetics of recorded sound. It shows how the language about sound is intimately connected to sense-making - both as a reflection of our internal cognitive capacities and as a component of our extended cognitive system. In doing so, the book provides the foundation for a broader understanding of the history of listening, discourses of sound quality, and artistic practices in the age of recorded music. The book will be of interest to anyone who asks how recorded music sounds and why it sounds as it does, and it will be a valuable resource for musicology students and researchers interested in the analysis of sound and the history of listening and record production. Additionally, sound engineers and laptop musicians will benefit from the book's exploration of the connection between embodied experiences and our cognitively processed experiences of recorded sound. The tools provided will be useful to these and other musicians who wish to intuitively interact with recorded or synthesized sound in a manner that more closely resembles the way they think and that makes sense of what they do.

The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction captures a new paradigm in the study of music interaction, as a wave of recent research focuses on the role of the human body in musical experiences. This volume brings together a broad collection of work that explores all aspects of this new approach to understanding how we interact with music, addressing the issues that have roused the curiosities of scientists for ages: to understand the complex and multi-faceted way in which music manifests itself not just as sound but also as a variety of cultural styles, not just as experience but also as awareness of that experience. With contributions from an interdisciplinary and international array of scholars, including both empirical and theoretical perspectives, the Companion explores an equally impressive array of topics, including: Dynamical music interaction theories and concepts Expressive gestural interaction Social music interaction Sociological and anthropological approaches Empowering health and well-being Modeling music interaction Music-based interaction technologies and applications This book is a vital resource for anyone seeking to understand human interaction with music from an embodied perspective.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE MONTH (APRIL 2017) Humans have become subservient to algorithms. Every day brings a new Moneyball fix - a maths whiz who will crack open an industry with clean fact-based analysis rather than human intuition and experience. As a result, we have stopped thinking. Machines do it for us. Christian Madsbjerg argues that our fixation with data often masks stunning deficiencies, and the risks for humankind are enormous. Blind devotion to number crunching imperils our businesses, our educations, our governments, and our life savings. Too many companies have lost touch with the humanity of their customers, while marginalising workers with arts-based skills. Contrary to popular thinking, Madsbjerg shows how many of today's biggest success stories stem not from 'quant' thinking but from deep, nuanced engagement with culture, language, and history. He calls his method sensemaking. In this landmark book, Madsbjerg lays out five principles for how business leaders, entrepreneurs, and individuals can use it to solve their thorniest problems. He profiles companies using sensemaking to connect with new customers, and takes readers inside the work process of sensemaking 'connoisseurs' like investor George Soros, architect Bjarke Ingels, and others. Both practical and philosophical, Sensemaking is a powerful rejoinder to corporate groupthink and an indispensable resource for leaders and innovators who want to stand out from the pack.