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A techno-cognitive look at how new technologies are shaping the future of musicking. “Musicking” encapsulates both the making of and perception of music, so it includes both active and passive forms of musical engagement. But at its core, it is a relationship between actions and sounds, between human bodies and musical instruments. Viewing musicking through this lens and drawing on music cognition and music technology, Sound Actions proposes a model for understanding differences between traditional acoustic “sound makers” and new electro-acoustic “music makers.” What is a musical instrument? How do new technologies change how we perform and perceive music? What happens when composers build instruments, performers write code, perceivers become producers, and instruments play themselves? The answers to these pivotal questions entail a meeting point between interactive music technology and embodied music cognition, what author Alexander Refsum Jensenius calls “embodied music technology.” Moving between objective description and subjective narrative of his own musical experiences, Jensenius explores why music makes people move, how the human body can be used in musical interaction, and how new technologies allow for active musical experiences. The development of new music technologies, he demonstrates, has fundamentally changed how music is performed and perceived.

Timbre is among the most important and the most elusive aspects of music. Visceral and immediate in its sonic properties, yet also considered sublime and ineffable, timbre finds itself caught up in metaphors: tone “color”, “wet” acoustics, or in Schoenberg's words, “the illusory stuff of our dreams.” This multi-disciplinary approach to timbre assesses the acoustic, corporeal, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of tone color in Western music practice and philosophy. It develops a new theorization of timbre and its crucial role in the epistemology of musical materialism through a vital materialist aesthetics in which conventional binaries and dualisms are superseded by a vibrant continuum. As the aesthetic and epistemological questions foregrounded by timbre are not restricted to isolated periods in music history or individual genres, but have pervaded Western musical aesthetics since early Modernity, the book discusses musical examples taken from both “classical” and “popular” music. These range, in “classical” music, from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the belcanto opera and electronic music to saturated music; and, in “popular” music, from indie through soul and ballad to dark industrial.

In Composition and Cognition, renowned composer and theorist Fred Lerdahl builds on his careerlong work of developing a comprehensive model of music cognition. Bringing together his dual expertise in composition and music theory, he reveals the way in which his research has served as a foundation for his compositional style and how his intuitions as a composer have guided his cognitively oriented theories. At times personal and reflective, this book offers an overall picture of the musical mind that has implications for central issues in contemporary composition, including the recurrent gap between method and result, and the tension between cognitive constraints and utopian aesthetic views of musical progress. Lerdahl's succinct volume provides invaluable insights for students and instructors, composers and music scholars, and anyone engaged with contemporary music.

Die Theorie des Hörens von Hermann von Helmholtz kreist um eine offene Frage: Wie geschieht der Übergang von der physikalischen Schwingung zum wahrgenommenen Klang? Helmholtz sucht die Antwort darauf nicht nur in einer Synthese des verfügbaren Wissens der Mathematik, Physik, Physiologie und Anatomie, sondern auch in der Musikgeschichte, die er als einen hörphysiologischen Langzeitversuch auffasst. Er fügt sie in sein eigenes Experimentalsystem ein, um das Wissen vom Hören aufzudecken, das in der Musik steckt. Julia Kursell zeichnet diese Experimentalisierung der Musik nach, nimmt das Verhältnis von Ohr und Instrument in den Blick und rekonstruiert die Rolle und Funktion der Musik in Helmholtz'Theorie der Wahrnehmung.

Marcel Prousts Madeleine in »A la recherche du temps perdu«, die Zitattechnik in den Werken von B.A. Zimmermann, die »ars memoriae« des Mittelalters oder der Bilderatlas »Mnemosyne« von Aby Warburg sind Beispiele dafür, wie sich Erinnerungen als Gedächtnisprozesse in Inhalt, Form und Theorien manifestieren können. Musik als Medium der Erinnerung ist in der Gedächtnisforschung bislang jedoch wenig berücksichtigt worden. Die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge widmen sich dem Gegenstand Musik und zeigen aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive die Relevanz erinnerungstheoretischer Konzepte im Bereich der (musik-)wissenschaftlichen Rezeption auf. Mit Beiträgen u.a. von Helga de la Motte-Haber, Melanie Unseld, Jan Assmann, Thomas Burkhalter und Ana Hofman.

India is a country with a huge diversity in culture and language. Indian music is one of the oldest types of music and is rich in its content and variation. Researching any one variety of music or mastering it is a lifetime task. It is very interesting to study and understand how music learning facilitate the enhanced auditory processing in musicians. A more interesting field of study would be how long term exposure to loud music could lead to deterioration in hearing. The topics covered will include how musical sounds are coded by the ear. Hearing is one of the important senses which builds bridges between what we hear and how we speak. Hearing plays a vital role in learning and performing music. Musicians spend a lot of time fine tuning their musical skills through hearing. If this training begins at an early age, their auditory processing gets enhanced owing to the fact that their listening training is continuously becoming complex with every new lesson in music. There are plenty of studies and research on speech perception but the research on music perception and hearing in musicians is scarce. When it comes to the Indian context, the research on music and hearing is still in its infancy. Over the past few years, as a faculty in audiology, the author discovered that music perception, understanding the hearing sense of musicians, auditory processing in musicians and prolonged exposure to music will cause deterioration in hearing in musicians. This book will contribute a lot to the understanding of normal hearing behavior. With this notion in mind, different studies were taken up to understand how musicians are different from non-musicians. These studies have opened up a lot of avenues to study the auditory behavior of musicians. Consequently, the author has added valuable research in this single compilation for the benefit of beginners in the field of audiology, music and those interested in the research of music. This book would be useful for the students of audiology, physics, music and other allied professionals interested in music and hearing.

Recorded music is as different to live music as film is to theatre. In this book, Simon Zagorski-Thomas employs current theories from psychology and sociology to examine how recorded music is made and how we listen to it. Setting out a framework for the study of recorded music and record production, he explains how recorded music is fundamentally different to live performance, how record production influences our interpretation of musical meaning and how the various participants in the process interact with technology to produce recorded music. He combines ideas from the ecological approach to perception, embodied cognition and the social construction of technological systems to provide a summary of theoretical approaches that are applied to the sound of the music and the creative activity of production. A wide range of examples from Zagorski-Thomas's professional experience reveal these ideas in action.

Our sense that a waltz is'in three'or a blues song is'in four with a shuffle'comes from our sense of musical meter. Hearing in Time explores the metric aspect of our musical experience from a psychological point of view. Musical meter is subject to a number of fundamental perceptual and cognitive constraints. These constraints are the cornerstones of Hearing in Time's account of musical meter. Hearing in Time also takes into account the fact that listening to music, like many other rhythmic activities, is something that we do a lot. It also approaches meter in the context of music as it is actually performed, with nuances of timing and dynamics, rather than as a theoretical idealization. Hearing in Time's approach to meter is not based on any particular musical style or cultural practice, and it discusses musical examples from a wide range of musical styles and cultures--from Beethoven and Bach to Brubeck and Ghanaian (Ewe) drumming. In taking this broad approach a number of fundamental similarities between a variety of different metric phenomena--such as the difference between so-called simple versus complex or additive meters - become apparent. Requiring only a modest ability to read a musical score, Hearing in Time is written for musicians, musicologists, and music theorists, as well as psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists who are interested in rhythm and meter.

A proposal that an embodied cognition approach to music research—drawing on work in computer science, psychology, brain science, and musicology—offers a promising framework for thinking about music mediation technology.Digital media handles music as encoded physical energy, but humans consider music in terms of beliefs, intentions, interpretations, experiences, evaluations, and significations. In this book, drawing on work in computer science, psychology, brain science, and musicology, Marc Leman proposes an embodied cognition approach to music research that will help bridge this gap. Assuming that the body plays a central role in all musical activities, and basing his approach on a hypothesis about the relationship between musical experience (mind) and sound energy (matter), Leman argues that the human body is a biologically designed mediator that transfers physical energy to a mental level—engaging experiences, values, and intentions—and, reversing the process, transfers mental representation into material form. He suggests that this idea of the body as mediator offers a promising framework for thinking about music mediation technology. Leman proposes that, under certain conditions, the natural mediator (the body) can be extended with artificial technology-based mediators. He explores the necessary conditions and analyzes ways in which they can be studied. Leman outlines his theory of embodied music cognition, introducing a model that describes the relationship between a human subject and its environment, analyzing the coupling of action and perception, and exploring different degrees of the body's engagement with music. He then examines possible applications in two core areas: interaction with music instruments and music search and retrieval in a database or digital library. The embodied music cognition approach, Leman argues, can help us develop tools that integrate artistic expression and contemporary technology.

In recent years, many psychologists and cognitive scientists have published their views on the psychology of music. Unfortunately, this scientific literature has remained inaccessible to musicologists and musicians, and has neglected their insights on the subject. In Ways of Listening, musicologist Eric Clarke explores musical meaning, music's critical function in human lives, and the relationship between listening and musical material. Clarke outlines an'ecological approach'to understanding the perception of music. The way we hear and understand music is not simply a function of our brain structure or of the musical'codes'given to us by culture, Clarke argues. Instead, cognitive, psychoacoustical, and semiotic issues must be considered within the physical and social contexts of listening. In essence, Clarke adapts John Gibson's influential ecological theory of perception to the complex process of perceiving music. In addition to making a theoretical argument, the author offers a number of case studies to illustrate his concept. For example, he analyzes the experience of listening to Jimi Hendrix's performance of the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969. Clarke examines how Hendrix's choice of instrument and venue, use of distortion, and the political climate in which he performed all had an impact on his audience's perception of the anthem. A complex convergence of broad cultural contexts and specific musical features - the entire'ecology'of the listening experience - is responsible for this performance's impact. Including both the best psychological research and careful musicological scholarship, Clarke's book offers the most complex and insightful perspective on musical meaning to date. It will be of interest to musicologists, musicians, psychologists, and scholars of aesthetics.

Our sense that a waltz is'in three'or a blues song is'in four with a shuffle'comes from our sense of musical meter. Hearing in Time explores musical meter from the point of view of cognitive theories of perception and attention. London explores how our ability to follow musical meter is simply a specific instance of our more general ability to synchronize our attention to regularly recurring events in our environment. As such, musical meter is subject to a number of fundamental perceptual and cognitive constraints, which form the cornerstones of London's account. Because listening to music, like many other rhythmic activities, is something that we often do, London views it as a skilled activity for performers and non-performers alike. Hearing in Time approaches musical meter in the context of music as it is actually performed, rather than as a theoretical ideal. Its approach is not based on any particular musical style or cultural practice, so it uses familiar examples from a broad range of music--Beethoven and Bach to Brubeck and Ghanaian drumming. Taking this broad approach brings out a number of fundamental similarities between a variety of different metric phenomena, such as the difference between so-called simple versus complex or additive meters. Because of its accessible style--only a modest ability to read a musical score is presumed--Hearing in Time is for anyone interested in rhythm and meter, including cognitive psychologists, musicologists, musicians, and music theorists.

This book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes--categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models--and explores the part these play in theories of musical organization. The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music scholarship has often been occupied, including the emergence of musical syntax and its relationship to musical semiosis, the problem of musical ontology, the relationship between words and music in songs, and conceptions of musical form and musical hierarchy. The book will be of interest to music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, as well as those with a professional or avocational interest in the application of work in cognitive science to humanistic principles.