Musical Interaction Reveals Music as Embodied Language

Progress in brain research, 2015

There have been many attempts to discuss the evolutionary origins of music. We review theories of music origins and take the perspective that music is originally derived from emotional signals. We show that music has adaptive value through emotional contagion, social cohesion, and improved well-being. We trace the roots of music through the emotional signals of other species suggesting that the emotional aspects of music have a long evolutionary history. We show how music and speech are closely interlinked with the musical aspects of speech conveying emotional information. We describe acoustic structures that communicate emotion in music and present evidence that these emotional features are widespread among humans and also function to induce emotions in animals. Similar acoustic structures are present in the emotional signals of nonhuman animals. We conclude with a discussion of music designed specifically to induce emotional states in animals.

Neurology of Music, 2010

ISME 2002 Bergen Norway

The current forces at work in Music Education seem to offer rather limited philosophical choices. Arguments against a somewhat abstract and disembodied aesthetics as a basis for advocacy have been raised by those claiming that a more pragmatic and “real-world” approach is needed. Recent developments in neurobiological research offers some new and useful information that pertains to meaning, feeling and emotion. This information does not directly relate to music, but it offers great potential for clarifying and understanding how music affects us, and it offers an empirical base for further investigation. One of the main points considered is the distinction between automated, categorical emotion, and conscious, internalized feeling. Another is the neurological underpinnings of these complex phenomena: they appear to originate in the sensory-motor systems of the brain. The systems that coordinate feeling, meaning, and even consciousness evolved alongside those that regulate our perception of the environment and our reactions to it. This argues against the concept of an introspective “world of the mind,” separate from the physical and biological world. There are implications for a more “embodied” approach to aesthetics, feelings, meaning, and eventually music education. Finally, the question of “what music means” might be replaced by “how” music comes to have meaning. And, once again, the sensory-motor systems seem to be involved. Our whole sense of consciously considered meaning has its origins in visual and perceptual systems and--ultimately--in our bodies.

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.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture, 2020

Music is a universal human activity. Its evolution and its value as a cognitive resource are starting to come into focus. This chapter endeavors to give readers a clearer sense of the adaptive aspects of music, as well as the underlying cognitive and neural structures. Special attention is given to the important emotional dimensions of music, and an evolutionary argument is made for thinking of music as a prelinguistic embodied form of cognition—a form that is still available to us as contemporary music creators and consumers.

A growing number of psychological and philosophical musicologists are becoming dissatisfied with the limitations of standard approaches to music cognition, which are often based on disembodied and de-contextualized appraisal processes. The activities and phenomena associated with the word ‘music’ span an incredibly wide range of human experience and as a result, many researchers are turning to embodied approaches in order to develop more nuanced ways of accounting for musical meaning and communication as it emerges at the intersection of biology, culture and lived experience. The practical implications of ‘embodied cognition’ are beginning to be developed across a range of areas, including music education. However, while the notion of ‘embodied ways of knowing’ is increasingly embraced by music and arts educators, the philosophical and scientific grounding for 'embodied music cognition' often receives less attention than it deserves. With this in mind, this paper examines embodied music cognition in the context of musical communication and meaning making; and it introduces related literature in human development, philosophy, and neuroscience. To conclude, the relevance of embodied music cognition is considered in the context of music education and practice.

Above all, music and language are forms of human communication. Since sensory function is ultimately shaped by what is biologically important to the organism, the human urge to communicate has been a powerful driving force in both the evolution of auditory function and the ways in which it can be changed by experience within an individual lifetime. The ability to extract meaning from sound requires that all aspects of the auditory system work together in concert: by considering human auditory function in the context of communication, we hope to emphasize the highly interactive nature of the auditory system as well as the depth of its integration with other sensory and cognitive systems. Through consideration of relations and dissociations between music and language we will explore key themes in auditory function, learning and plasticity.

Music is a core human experience and generative processes reflect cognitive capabilities. Music is often functional because it is something that can promote human well-being by facilitating human contact, human meaning, and human imagination of possibilities, tying it to our social instincts. Cognitive systems also underlie musical performance and sensibilities. Music is one of those things that we do spontaneously, reflecting brain machinery linked to communicative functions, enlarged and diversified across a broad array of human activities. Music cuts across diverse cognitive capabilities and resources, including numeracy, language, and space perception. In the same way, music intersects with cultural boundaries, facilitating our "social self" by linking our shared experiences and intentions. This paper focuses on the intersection between the neuroscience of music, and human social functioning to illustrate the importance of music to human behaviors.

EMBO reports, 2009

Here we review the most important psychological aspects of music, its neural substrates, its universality and likely biological origins and, finally, how the study of neurocognition and emotions of music can provide one of the most important windows to the comprehension of the higher brain functioning and human mind. We begin with the main aspects of the theory of modularity, its behavioral and neuropsychological evidences. Then, we discuss basic psychology and neuropsychology of music and show how music and language are cognitively and neurofunctionally related. Subsequently we briefly present the evidences against the view of a high degree of specification and encapsulation of the putative language module, and how the ethnomusicological, pscychological and neurocognitive studies on music help to shed light on the issues of modularity and evolution, and appear to give further support for a cross-modal, interactive view of neurocognitive processes. Finally, we will argue that the notion of large modules do not adequately describe the organization of complex brain functions such as language, math or music, and propose a less radical view of modularity, in which the modular systems are specified not at the level of culturally determined cognitive domains but more at the level of perceptual and sensorimotor representations. © Cien.