Psychobiology of Musical Gesture: Innate Rhythm, Harmony and Melody

Music and gesture–2. Aldershot, UK: …, 2009

After the pleasures which arise from gratification of the bodily appetites, there seems to be none more natural to man than Music and Dancing. In the progress of art and improvement they are, perhaps, the first and earliest pleasures of his own invention; for those which arise from the gratification of the bodily appetites cannot be said to be his own invention. Adam Smith ([1777] 1982: 187) Time and measure are to instrumental Music what order and method are to discourse; they break it into proper parts and divisions, by which we are enabled both to remember better what has gone before, and frequently to forsee somewhat of what is to come after: we frequently forsee the return of a period which we know must correspond to another which we remember to have gone before; and according to the saying of an ancient philosopher and musician, the enjoyment of Music arises partly from memory and partly from foresight. Adam Smith ([1777] 1982: 204) Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. Alfred North

Frontiers in Psychology, 2018

Music is at the centre of what it means to be human-it is the sounds of human bodies and minds moving in creative, story-making ways. We argue that music comes from the way in which knowing bodies (Merleau-Ponty) prospectively explore the environment using habitual 'patterns of action,' which we have identified as our innate 'communicative musicality.' To support our argument, we present short case studies of infant interactions using micro analyses of video and audio recordings to show the timings and shapes of intersubjective vocalizations and body movements of adult and child while they improvise shared narratives of meaning. Following a survey of the history of discoveries of infant abilities, we propose that the gestural narrative structures of voice and body seen as infants communicate with loving caregivers are the building blocks of what become particular cultural instances of the art of music, and of dance, theatre and other temporal arts. Children enter into a musical culture where their innate communicative musicality can be encouraged and strengthened through sensitive, respectful, playful, culturally informed teaching in companionship. The central importance of our abilities for music as part of what sustains our well-being is supported by evidence that communicative musicality strengthens emotions of social resilience to aid recovery from mental stress and illness. Drawing on the experience of the first author as a counsellor, we argue that the strength of one person's communicative musicality can support the vitality of another's through the application of skilful techniques that encourage an intimate, supportive, therapeutic, spirited companionship. Turning to brain science, we focus on hemispheric differences and the affective neuroscience of Jaak Panksepp. We emphasize that the psychobiological purpose of our innate musicality grows from the integrated rhythms of energy in the brain for prospective, sensationseeking affective guidance of vitality of movement. We conclude with a Coda that recalls the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, which built on the work of Heraclitus and Spinoza. This view places the shared experience of sensations of living-our communicative musicality-as inspiration for rules of logic formulated in symbols of language.

Musicae Scientiae, 2008

This special issue is based on the presentations and rich discussions held during two symposia at the joint conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) and of the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), which took place in Bologna, Italy, in August 2006. The themes of the two symposia were centred on the question of the origins of human musicality, especially through the notions of gesture, intersubjective communication and narrative. The following texts develop these notions through careful argumentation and empirical demonstration. In some sense this special issue can also be seen as a follow-up to the one entitled Rhythm, musical narrative, and origins of human communication, published in the same journal in 1999. The idea of an innate "communicative musicality" was first developed by Stephen Malloch (1999) and Colwyn Trevarthen (1999), (see Malloch & Trevarthen, in press). Musicality is rooted in a human capacity to partake in forms of communication with close others giving rise to both local intersubjective experiences and broader socio-cultural affiliations. Musicality is thus primarily an interactive and communicative process; one that puts into play not only the human voice and its musical inflections but also the whole body, its gestures and orientations. The temporal and dynamic profiles of the embodied gestures involved in interaction shape both individual expression and forms of interpersonal sharing, whether in the context of musical performance, conversation, child play or, most obviously perhaps, affectionate communication between adults and preverbal infants. Based on their observations of mothers and infants in diverse contexts, Malloch, Trevarthen, and also Gratier (1999, 2003) and Devouche and Gratier (2001) show that this temporal profile presents three fairly steady qualities. All interactive musical communication has a regular implicit rhythm that has been called the pulse of the interaction. It presents also a sequential organisation whose units are most often shapes or melodic contours. Finally it transmits something like a content that can be described as narrative. Malloch (1999) defines narrative as fundamentally temporal and intersubjective: "Narratives are the very essence of human companionship and communication. Narratives allow two persons to share a sense of passing time, and to create and share the emotional envelopes that evolve through this shared time" (1999, p. 45). Daniel Stern (1985) called this sequential profile that unfolds in time with a beginning, a development and an end a proto-narrative envelope. It is what gives unity to shared experience within the "present moment" (Stern, 2004), which is cut out against the continuity of time and interpersonal exchange. The idea of a human musicality then subsumes the concepts of gesture, 3

In this paper, I propose that embodied cognition in music has two distinct levels: 1) the apparent corporeal articulation of music by performers and listeners, which reflects either a desire to make visible their emotional responses to the music or rhythmic entrainment, and 2) the principal (though concealed) level of transient muscular reactions to the main coding aspects in music: the tonal relationships arranged in time. This paper argues that the apparent corporeal articulation with regard to the entrainment effect and dance (Leman & Maes, 2014) is more related to the multimodal integration that is characteristic of attending to such a multidisciplinary performing art as opera and ballet than to purely musical content. I also present empirical data on the perception of tonal distances (Korsakova-Kreyn & Dowling, 2014) and suggest an explanation of why listeners' intuitive navigation in tonal and temporal space lies at the heart of emotional responses to music, including corporeal articulation. In addition, the paper touches on the research into temporality in music, such as memory constraints in the perception of tonal structures (Tillmann & Bigand, 2004). The main emphasis of this paper is on the principal two dimensions of music: tonal relationships and time. Understanding the primacy of these dimensions is important for defining music cognition and music in general. The paper also identifies the need for collaboration among various subdisciplines in musicology and the cognitive sciences so as to further the development of the nascent field of embodied cognition in music. KEYWORDS: music perception, embodied cognition, emotional processing in music Expressive distinctions are easily encoded by the listeners through the verbal labels, but they are practically untranslatable by bodily mediation, when body expression is induced by the musical stimulus. Frances and Bruchon-Schweitzer (1983) The concept of embodied cognition is based on the understanding that our emotions, memory, speech, and imagination are inseparable from the experiences of our bodies. To say it differently, a mind is shaped by the motor and somatosensory experience of the body that houses that mind. Music, a very special form of communication between humans, illustrates two levels of embodied cognition. The first, " surface " level is the influence of visible bodily movement on music perception and cognition. The second, " deep " level deals with melodic morphology. Our minds read melodic information by comparing differences in the perceived tonal stability of melodic elements. The sense of stability is directly related to a physical sensation of perceived tension, which means that melodic morphology is based on a highly primitive principle of perception that involves changes in somatic tension (Radchenko et al., 2015)—changes that most likely include transient actions of the musculature in response to tonal and temporal patterns. This is why tonal music presents what is probably the most obvious and holistic example of embodied cognition. SPEECH AND EMBODIED COGNITION The theory of embodied cognition postulates that sensory information and motor activity are essential for understanding the surrounding world and for developing the abilities that are important for abstract reasoning (Foglia & Wilson, 2013). Because both memory and speech include sensorimotor representations, our imagination relies on previously experienced gestures and movements (Wellsby &

Music is a poorly understood ability. Its strong power over humans, its origin and cognitive function, have been a mystery for a long time. Aristotle (1995) listed the power of music among the great unsolved problems. Darwin wrote (1871) that musical ability “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which (man) is endowed.” Nature published a series of essays on music (Editorial, 2008). The authors of these essays agreed that “none... has yet been able to answer the fundamental question: why does music have such power over us?” (Ball, 2008). In this article I advocate a hypothesis that music has a specific cognitive function to embody abstract thoughts. This embodiment proceeds through musical emotions, special types of emotions that we may experience when listening to music and that connect abstract thoughts and mental representations to instinctual drives. The embodiment of abstract thoughts through music is a unique contribution of this article.

2013

This chapter describes and analyses aspects of musical play at the two primary schools involved in the research. We are concerned not only with sound but also with other modes of communication, especially sight, gesture and touch, in musical play. There has long been recognition that music's essentially sonic nature is closely allied to speech, gesture and movement (Tagg 2002) and there is a growing literature on music and gesture as well as music and language (Gritten & King 2006; Godøy & Leman 2010; Gritten & King 2011). The conceptualization of musical play as embodied has also gathered strength in a number of recent works (Gaunt 2006, Marsh 2008, Beresin 2010, Willett 2011). Marsh documents the acquisition, transmission and recreation of music, text and movement in such forms as handclapping games, including media-referenced examples. Gaunt's investigation of black girls' vernacular practices and their relation to African American musical culture leads her to posit the concept of 'kinetic orality', the conjunction of oral and kinetic transmission in which social meanings are observed, acquired and 'naturalized' in personal consciousness (2006: 5). This is suggestive of a kind of bodily habitus developing out of group play experiences

MUSICA movet : affectus, ludus, corpus, 2019

According to the theory of embodied cognition, gestures are at the very heart of human cognitive processes. The idea of embodied cognition is based on cognitive schemata and categories that emerge from the amassed experience of being and acting in the world. In human cognitive processes, many features of cognition are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism, so the physical domain serves as a source domain for understanding an idea or conceptual domain, using the tools of metaphor. As a basic element of the physical domain, the phenomenon of gesture has garnered particular attention and it has been recently studied in various fields such as phenomenology, EMT (Extended Mind Thesis), psychology, neuro-phenomenology, neo-cognitivism, robotics, critical theory, linguistics, neuroscience, constructivism, but also in music theory. In music, gestures encompass a large territory-from purely physical (bodily) on one side of the axis to mental (imagined) on the other. From a student's adopting of a teacher's posture, even facial expressions, to the syndrome of "watching" music, as in conductors' and players' gestures, both practical (sound producing) and expressive (auxiliary), to metaphorical concepts of up and down in intervals, scales, or as recognizable idioms of a composer's language (strategic) or style (stylistic), the phenomenon of gesture in music can be explored and perceived from many different viewpoints. In this paper, the issue of the inseparability of body and sound in musical practice will be explored, especially how these two basic types of gesture in music can intertwine and help deepen its performance. For this purpose, Alexandra Pierce's embodied analytical exercises will be used, those which enable the performer to explore gesturally the expressive meaning of a musical piece. It will be demonstrated that musical gesture supports performance-oriented analysis more than we think, know, or imagine.

Journal of Music Theory, 2020

Intermédialités, 2012

Sense and Synchrony: Infant Communication and Musical Improvisation maya GR at i e R , J u l i e N maGN i e R V erbal exchange is undoubtedly the pinnacle of human communication. Language use is often conceptualized as guided by internal mental representations. Relatively few research programs have focused on the sonic and embodied aspects of linguistic discourse and exchange. Indeed, language-based communication cannot be separated from at least some vocal determinants that contribute to shaping the meaning of a message. The materiality of linguistic expression (voice, gesture, etc.) is the foundation for conversational exchange. Conversation analysts take into account the expressive multimodality of verbal and non-verbal behaviour between speakers. They are interested in the order and sequencing of chunks of speech that convey specific thoughts, as well as the temporal continuity of the interaction as a whole. More specifically, the gestures, prosody and phonology used by speakers provide major cues for understanding interaction at both local and global levels. Thus, integrating temporality and corporeality is necessary if the aim is to understand the process of interpersonal coordination. In any case, the paradigm of representational cognition seems nowadays to be less meaningful than that of embodied cognition. Within this framework, musical communication between musicians, and between musicians and their audiences, has recently emerged as a valuable field of study. Music forces us away from studying the mere representational function of verbal language, because it is naturally suggestive of broader, polysemic, and perhaps more intimate, meanings (emotions, moods, feelings). Furthermore, musical meaning is even more clearly dependent on its temporal dimensions (sequence, order, synchrony). In his well-known essay, "Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationships," the sociologist Alfred Schütz 1 describes musical