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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 artificial 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 affords 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 must19 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 logicalterms. 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 different as listening, performing and even

33 composing or improvising and offers 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

PIPS No. : 5270371h LE h TYPESET

MS Code : AXIO 78 h CP h DISK

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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 effects of music performance37 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 neuroimaging41 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 findings which are at least fascinating: there are func-

46 tional and structural differences between the brains of musicians

47 and non-musicians which are illustrative of the neural plasticity and48 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 dealing54 with music.55 Music, as a man-made construction or artifact, however, is

56 biologically non-relevant: there is no causal relation between the57 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 elicit59 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 scientific 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 its78 environment. This is anecosemiotic position (for a critical definition,

79 see Kull 1998b) with the listener as anorganismus 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 musician82 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 The90 doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its91 qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production. The artist92 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 (see97 Delalande 1984; Lidov 1987). There is, in fact, empirical evidence that98 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 with102 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 ofcyberneticsand artificial devices.

119 2.1 The control system as a starting point

120 Cybernetics is a unifying discipline which brings together concepts as121 different as the flow 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 as124 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 the127 capacity of acting more or less intelligently given only partial information, learning128 by their mistakes, adapting to heterogeneous and changing environments, and129 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 interesting135 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, according146 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, that150 system achieves a degree of epistemic autonomy relative to its surrounds. (2001b, p. 60)

151 Adaptive devices can change the informational relationships with152 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 of156 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 sensed161 through interaction (poking, pushing, bending), (iii) sensory evolution

162 or adaptive construction of entirely new sensors and (iv) internalized163 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 effector function, on the other hand,

166 can be modified as well. The device can change its effectors 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 (active170 sensing). It changes our sensing function without altering the sensor

171 structures, requiring only additional coordinative and motor re-

172 sources. The coordinative function, finally, mediates between

173 sensing and acting, realizing percept-action mappings which can be174 simple reflexes 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 control182 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 flux. What matters, therefore, is the

185 semiotization of the sonic world and the possibility to conceive of186 music in terms of musical semantics and the related concept ofepi-

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 ofevent perception and cognitive economy. Events and also193 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 effort of processing, as it is much easier to select and delimit199 an events and to pick it up in an act of episodic attention than to deal200 with it in an act of sustained attention. But which auditory events

201 should be selected for conscious processing? There are literally tens of202 thousands of possible events in an average movement of classical

203 symphonic music (Fink 2001). These are at least as many as there are204 notes in the score and probably there are many more of them. It is up

205 to the listener, therefore, to define those events that are significant

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 infinity to manageable proportions when we go beyond

209 the merely perceptual aspects of dealing with the music. This means210 that we should consider an interactive approach to coping with the211 sonic world which brings together perception and action as exem-

212 plified 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 phenomena221 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 process225 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 operations232 that go beyond mere identification and classification, 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 is238 appealing by its simplicity it consists of the four major moments of239 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 (closed243 loop) and by the interposition of intermediate variables between the

244 stimuli and the reactions to these stimuli. As such it fits 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 sum248 up: the many automata of the present age are coupled to the outside world both for249 the reception of impressions and the performance of actions. They contain sense250 organs, effectors, 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 description252 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 defined semiotically as a system which

256 receives and transforms knowledge of the world so as to figure

257 out a way to change this knowledge to benefit 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 difference between the processing of infor-

260 mation at the level of the reflexes as against the higher-level cognitive261 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 aninternal modelof265 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 effector. With the one it invests the object with a receptor cue or274 perceptual meaning, with the other, an effector cue or operational meaning. But since275 all of the traits of an object are structurally interconnected, the traits given opera-276 tional meaning must affect those bearing perceptual meaning through the object, and277 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 loop280 that links action and perception, and that has its origins in the con-281 cept of the reflex arc, with this proviso that the linearity of the282 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 sensorymotor294 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 world301 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 artificial devices

305 (Cariani 1989, 2001a, b; Ziemke & Sharkey 2001). It stresses the

306 ecological conception of interaction with the environment, and307 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 of310 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 asimulatoras 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 Umweltof 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 sum335 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 signification which invest the objects withper-

339 ceptual and effector tones. To the extent that these are represented

340 in the subjects inner world, they call forth a gradual transition

341 fromcybernetic to semiotic analysis of the interaction with the outer342 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 inepis-

347 temologicalterms 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 perform353 these operations, and, hence, that the properties of the observer, by specifying the354 operations that he or she can perform determine the observers domain of possible355 observations (1978, pp. 2829)

356 The central point in this approach is the role of subjectivity and

357 the way it influences 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 the368 things on earth; (ii) the biological level of constraints includes only

369 the living organisms; and (iii) the zoological level, finally, 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 of372 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 difference 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 of379 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-level386 functioning, we can rely again on the already mentioned theoretical

387 work of von Uexku ll (1982(1940), 1957(1934); see Kull 2001 for an388 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 different 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 for396 the forester which give the object a particular and specific 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 eitherperceptualor 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 affect the perceptual ones: they transform409 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, it414 possesses few functional images, its world, too, will consist of few objects. As a result415 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. It417 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 tofunctional

421 characteristics of the environment. Animals and organisms, in gen-

422 eral, perceive objects in their environment in terms of what they

423 afford 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:affordances as he first coined the426 term are environmental supports for an organisms intentional

427 activities. They are subjective qualities that render them apt for428 specific activities such as supporting locomotion, concealment,

429 manipulation, nutrition and social interaction for the animal (Gibson430 1979). Translated to the realm of music this should mean that we try

431 to understand music in terms of what it affords 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 signification. 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 ofsonic Umwelt,437 which can be considered as a collection of subjective meanings that

438

are assigned on some elements of a specific subset of the sounding439 environment.

3. ENACTIVE COGNITION AND THE INTERACTIONAL

APPROACH

442 The concept of Umwelt is appealing: every organism is able to build443 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 ofadaptive device

445 as an artificial device which can choose or tune its sensors, effectors446 and the coordinative mappings between them (Cariani 1989, 1991):

447 When adaptive systems construct their own sensors and effectors, they then deter-

448 mine, within limits, the categories through which they interact with the world. This449 confers upon such systems a limited degree of epistemic autonomyin effect they450 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 they456 can be modified 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 asmeasuring 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-affair: a measure-467 ment is produced by measuring devices that interact with their

468 environs and provide apointer-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 different position in space. These pointer-signs reflect the particular

472 interactions between the measuring apparatus and the outer world.

473 Given these initial conditions, it is possible to carry out predictive474 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 the478 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 ofmodel(internal model of the

481 outer world) and strategic play (Klaus 1972). It reminds us of the





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483 epistemic generalizations ofhomo 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 classification), of homo faber as an effector 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), and491 raises the functioning of the rule system to a level that transcends the492 reactive machinery of causal stimulus-reaction chains. Reactive493 activity involves a direct input-output coupling sensory input and

494 resulting effectbased on a transfer function of a particular automa-

495 tism that is not influenced by its previous history (Meystel 1998). As

496 such it is not fitted 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 the499 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 of506 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 (Lakoff & 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 musical516 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. They523 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 organism to change itself in order to survive in its environment (Fleagle

533 1999). The claim, however, can be translated also to the realms of534 cognition, as did Piaget (1977). Especially his concepts ofassimilation

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 first there is a matching (11 relationship) between the sounding541 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 elements547 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 lot550 of discussion and have influenced profoundly the constructivist ap-

551 proach to knowledge acquisition in general (see von Glasersfeld552 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 the555 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 effector 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 already562 defined 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 or568 must we take into account also the claims ofnon-objectivist cognition

569 (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1988) which defines 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 world573 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 of584 a reality external to human experience (Lakoff 1987, p.120). As such

585 it is related to the epistemological claims ofexperientialand enactive

586 cognition (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Varela et al. 1991) which are,

587 in turn, related to theembodiedapproach 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 in590 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), autopoiesis593 theory (Maturana, Varela) and Lakoffs 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 of603 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 specific context of activity. It

606 defines 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 ofdoing and undergoingin the experience615 proper. James (1912 (1976)), in turn, has introduced his doctrine of

616 radical empiricism, which is an original epistemology that deals with617 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 perceptual622 flux (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 of628 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 that633 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 fits in with the categorization theory of

639 Rosch (Rosch et al. 1976; Rosch 1978; see also Dubois 1991).640 Especially herbasic-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 up644 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 they649 seem to be objective to the extent that our bodies can interact

650 optimally with them (Lakoff 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 organism and of the music as a sounding environment. But how can

657 the listener make sense out of this environment? This is the basic

658 problem of maintaining ongoing epistemic contact with the perceptual

659 flux, which involves real-time processing and decoding of the sonorous

660 unfolding through time. Dependent upon the role the mind is 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 ofdirect perception is an ill-defined category which is

665 responsible for a lot of ambiguity. It is grounded in ecological theory666 (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 andcontinuous-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 integrated685 mental image, allowing the assignment of salience to events in terms of adaptive686 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 has688 no means of reviewing explicitly its present perceptions in terms of analogues in the689 past or in terms of anticipated analogues projected to the future. It has no direct690 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 can694 process the incoming information in a more economical way. As such695 it is an important cognitive tool that transcends perceptual bonding

696 and that allows us to doautonomous 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 difference

699 which was drawn by James (1912 (1976)) in his distinction between700 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 calls706 forth the veridicality of perception and which allows us to speak of707 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 auditory713 listening as the only processing mechanism (Handel 1989). Making

714 sense out of the perceptual flux must go beyond a mere acoustical

715 description of the sound: what matters is not merely the continuous

716 flow of matter in the physical world, but the perceptual and cognitive717 processes of the perceiver, which means that we must consider the718 role of the way how human listeners structure the acoustic flow. 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 mediationof 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 affair. 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 the737 environment (Shepard 1984). As such, it is related to adaptive

738 behavior, which fits in with the claims ofbiosemiotics 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; Hoffmeyer 1997a, b, 1998; Sebeok 1998). The role ofinteraction

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 defined 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 field 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 anorganismenvironment 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 (the765 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 and769 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 difference 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 beyond776 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 different vertebrates, the basic body-plans, sensory organs, and neural rep-784 resentations are roughly similar. We see in different colors, hear in different frequency785 registers, and smell different odors, but the basic relational organizations of our786 percept-spaces in the end may not be so radically different. (Cariani 1998b, p. 252)

787 Arguing on these lines we can question the ecological claim ofdirect

788 perception (Gibson 1966, 1979, 1982) which states that perception is789 possible without the mind intervening in the process of making sense of790 the perceptual flux. 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 ofcognitive 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 applying805 discrete labels to slices of the temporal unfolding. Both approaches

806 hold different 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 not809 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 means816 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 affords perceptual sig-

829 nificance 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 systemswhich are tuned to the information that is considered to

832 be useful. Hence the role of key concepts as attunement, reciprocity833 and resonance and the corresponding perceptual processes ofdetec-

834 tion, discrimination, recognition and identification. 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 call838 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 paradigm842 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 which846 science is built. To be aware of this will lead one to start in the middle instead of in847 the extreme, not to start either with the subject nor the object, but to start with the848 process of knowing in the living systems which is basically what second order849 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 consider856 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 be861 considered as universals in music cognition (see Brunner 1998; Kon862 1998; Marconi 1998; Miereanu & Hascher 1998; Normet 1998; Pa-863 dilla 1998). A musical experience, on this view, is not basically

864 different from an auditory experience at large. It is continuous with

865 the natural experience or experience proper (see Dewey 1958

866 (1934)) with a difference 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 fyingand focussing of attention. As such it is related to the principles873 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 almost881 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, differentiation 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 Koffka and can

890 be summarized by five transitions which are typical of perceptual

891 learning at large: (i) the transition from syncretic to discrete, (ii) from892 diffuse to articulate, (iii) from indeterminate to determinate, (iv) from

893 rigid to flexible 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 descriptions900 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, mostly907 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 ofevents which can be defined in oper-

923 ational terms as something happening to something, with the

924 something happening being specified 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, for929 example, is a structural invariant, the specific 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 to936 memory phenomena, which is related to the core ideas ofevent 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 essentially940 veridical. These core ideas, in turn, are very similar to what is com-

941 monly known as theevent 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 in947 memory (Bartlett 1984).

948 Events, further, can be defined 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

MARK REYBROUCK26




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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 categoricalrather than auditory perceptionto 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, the963 acoustic properties are heard directly, with the perceptual events964 being deduced (Handel 1989, p. 274). There is, in fact, a difference

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. Event970 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 specified when the two-variable974 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 to981 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 identification over time (Wittmann 1999; Witt-

987 mann & Po ppel 19992000). Most musical events, for example, have988 a clearly defined 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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1032 cognitive economy and allows usto render discriminably different

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 of1038 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 implicitontological 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 differentiated by1051 major ontological category features such as thing, place, direction,1052 action, event, manner and amount, smell and time (Jackendoff 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 is1058 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 flux. 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 and1069 experiential cognition.





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1070 Cognition, however, relies on principles ofcognitive 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 efforts. Listening, on

1075 this view, is a process of sense-making that reduces the virtual infinity1076 of information of the perceptual flux 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 a1083 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 definitions 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 the1089 outcome of perceptualmotor interactions with the environment1090 (Mazet 1991). It restates the hypothesis that there is a correspondence

1091 between the structure of our categories and the degree of functional1092 interaction of individuals with their environment (Dougherty 1978).

1093 As such, it broadens the field of categorization from mereperceptual

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 (B

reybrouck. axiomathes.pdf

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