Andrea Schiavio

Context: The past few years have presented us with a growing amount of theoretical research (yet that is often based on neuroscientific developments) in the field of enactive music cognition. Problem: Current cognitivist and embodied approaches to music cognition suffer, in our opinion, from a too firm commitment to the explanatory role of mental representations in musical experience. This particular problem can be solved by adopting an enactive approach to music cognition. Method: We present and compare cognitivist, embodied and enactive approaches to music cognition and review the current research in enactive music cognition. Results: We find that, in general, the enactive approaches to human musicality are capable of explaining the basic relationship between a musical subject and a musical object according to a pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic form of understanding related to bodily motor expertise. This explanation does not rely on on sophisticated forms of representation. Implications: Proponents of enactive music cognition should, in our opinion, focus on providing a consistent explanation of the most basic level of musical understanding. Constructivist content: We hope to invite the constructivist community to engage with the discussions on the intersection between music and enactivism

In this paper, we advance the thesis that music-making can be advantageously understood as an exploratory phenomenon. While music-making is certainly about aesthetic expression, from a phenomenological, cognitive, and even evolutionary perspective, it more importantly concerns structured explorations of the world around us, our minds, and our bodies. Our thesis is based on an enactive and phenomenological analysis of three cases: the first concerns the study of infants involved in early musical activities, and the two latter are phenomenologically inspired interviews with an expert jazz improviser, and members of a prominent string quartet. Across these examples, we find that music-making involves a dual intentionality - one oriented towards the exploration of the sonic, material, and social environment, and one oriented toward the self, including the exploration of bodily awareness and reflective mental states. In enactivist terms, exploration is a fundamental way of making sense of oneself as coupled with the world. Understanding music-making as a pre-eminent case of exploration helps us explicate and appreciate the developmental, sensorimotor, and more advanced cognitive resources that exist in music-making activities.

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind.

In a newly designed collaborative online music course, four musical novices unknown to each other learned to play the clarinet starting from zero. Over the course of 12 lessons, a special emphasis was placed on creativity, mutual interaction, and bodily movement. Although addressing these dimensions might be particularly challenging in distance learning contexts, a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with the learners revealed how the teaching approach proposed has generally facilitated learning. Qualitative findings highlight the importance of establishing meaningful relationships with the musical instrument as well as with other students to build musicality, and of the interplay between creativity and control in individual and collective music-making activities. We suggest that remote music tuition with a small group can be a valuable resource to start learning music and that a creative, collaborative, and movement-based approach can contribute to musical growth.

In the present study, we combined first-, second-, and third-person levels of analysis to explore the feeling of being and acting together in the context of collaborative artistic performance. Following participation in an international competition held in Czech Republic in 2018, a team of ten artistic swimmers took part in the study. First, a self-assessment instrument was administered to rate the different aspects of togetherness emerging from their collective activity; second, interviews based on video recordings of their performance were conducted individually with all team members; and third, the performance was evaluated by external artistic swimming experts. By combining these levels of analysis in different ways, we explore how changes in togetherness and lived experience in individual behavior may shape, disrupt, and stabilize joint performance. Our findings suggest that the experience of being and acting together is transient and changing, often alternating phases of decrease and increase in felt togetherness that can be consistently recognized by swimmers and external raters.

Embodied approaches to cognition conceive of mental life as emerging from the ongoing relationship between neural and extra-neural resources. The latter include, first and foremost, our entire body, but also the activity patterns enacted within a contingent milieu, cultural norms, social factors, and the features of the environment that can be used to enhance our cognitive capacities (e.g., tools, devices, etc.). Recent work in music education and sport psychology has applied general principles of embodiment to a number of social contexts relevant to their respective fields. In particular, both disciplines have contributed fascinating perspectives to our understanding of how skills are acquired and developed in groups; how musicians, athletes, teachers, and coaches experience their interactions; and how empathy and social action participate in shaping effective performance. In this paper, we aim to provide additional grounding for this research by comparing and further developing original themes emerging from this cross-disciplinary literature and empirical works on how performative skills are acquired and optimized. In doing so, our discussion will focus on: (1) the feeling of being together, as meaningfully enacted in collective musical and sport events; (2) the capacity to skillfully adapt to the contextual demands arising from the social environment; and (3) the development of distributed forms of bodily memory. These categories will be discussed from the perspective of embodied cognitive science and with regard to their relevance for music education and sport psychology. It is argued that because they play a key role in the acquisition and development of relevant skills, they can offer important tools to help teachers and coaches develop novel strategies to enhance learning and foster new conceptual and practical research in the domains of music and sport.

The notion of affordance has been introduced by Gibson (1977, 1979) as the feature of an object or the environment that allows the observer to perform an action, a set of “environmental supports for an organism’s intentional activities” (Reybrouck 2005). Studied under very different perspectives, this concept has become a crucial issue not only for the ecological psychology, but also for cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence studies, and philosophy of mind. This variety of approaches has widened the already ambiguous definition originally provided by Gibson, contributing to the development of different standpoints in open contrast with each other (see Zipoli Caiani 2011). During the last two decades, moreover, many researchers tried to extend the notion also to musical experience, aiming to draw a coherent theory of musical affordances (e.g. Clarke 2005; Nussbaum 2007; Krueger 2011a; 2011b). In this paper, we will argue for a particular concept of musical affordances, that is, as we see it, one narrower and less ambiguous in scope and more closely related to its original. Taking the discovery of canonical neurons as our starting point, we will (i) introduce the general notion of affordance, (ii) discuss some significant contributions in this area of research, mostly focusing on musical affordances and (iii) propose a motor-based interpretation of musical affordances.

Introduction Basic Emotion Theory proper (BET) has only recently begun to make an appearance in musical research (see Juslin, 1998; 2013a&b). However, much theory and research in music psychology has been driven by a more general assumption that musical emotions should be investigated in terms of discrete ad-hoc categories associated with the ways specific neural mechanisms respond to musical stimuli (see Schiavio et al., 2016). This has been problematized, however, by studies that show that the physiological changes associated with musical emotions do not always align clearly with those exhibited in association with everyday emotion categories (Krumhansl, 1997, p. 351; Scherer & Zentner, 2001). Such concerns have led some scholars to posit that musical emotions may be somehow different (or perhaps ‘impoverished’) versions of real emotions (Sloboda, 2000). In response to this, other researchers (e.g., Scherer & Couthino, 2014) have developed models that do away with the notion of basic emotions altogether, preferring instead to describe emotional reactions to music in terms of complex information processing components that combine in various ways to produce relevant outputs (see also Huron, 2006). Still others (Krueger, 2013; Schiavio et al., 2016; van der Schyff, 2013; see also Koelsch, 2013) have suggested that reducing musical experience to a stimulus-response framework - where emotions are thought to be caused in listeners by pre-given stimuli in the environment - may play down the active and creative role living embodied agents play in musical experience.With this in mind, we offer below a brief critique of BET, suggesting that it may not in fact provide the best way forward for research in musical emotions. We then outline an alternative perspective, drawing on research that employs dynamical systems theory (DST) (Colombetti, 2014; Lewis & Granic, 2000). To conclude, we offer some preliminary suggestions for how this approach might be applied in musical contexts. Before we begin, it should be noted that musical research that draws on the idea of ‘basic emotions’ has indeed produced important insights. Such studies are carried out in controlled settings that adhere to high scientific research standards - they offer important sources of data that will have to be taken into consideration by any alternative theoretical orientation. To be clear, then, our aim is not to debunk or discredit the work of researchers endorsing BET. Rather, our goal is simply to outline another perspective that could make important contributions to the dialogue. Basic emotions In folk psychology, the notion of ‘basic emotions’ involves the assumption that emotions come in a group of pre-defined categories such as happy, sad, angry and so on. This idea has been formalized by Basic Emotion Theory (BET) proper, which claims the existence of a small group of ‘discrete’ basic emotions that evolved in response to the challenges our ancestors faced in their everyday life (Ekman, 1980). It is argued that each basic emotion is defined by a dedicated (innate and distinct) neural network, which controls the ‘affect programs’ that give rise to them (Tomkins, 1962, 1963; see also Colombetti, 2014). Here the term ‘affect programs’ refers to the mechanisms that produce “the patterns for these complex organized responses, and which when set off directs their occurrence” (Ekman, 1980a p., 82). Such programs and the responses they trigger (i.e., basic emotions) are thought to be culturally universal and are thus understood to function as “auto appraisals” selected by evolution (Ekman, 1999; Ekman, 2003; Ekman & Friesen, 1971, 1986). It has also been suggested that because of the supposed categorical fixity of these basic emotions, they might form the ‘building blocks’ from which more complex emotions emerge (Prinz, 2004a&b).Some critics have raised the question of how, precisely, alleged basic emotions relate to non-basic ones (Ortony & Turner, 1990). And there is an ongoing debate between those who argue that basic and non-basic emotions are continuous (Clark, 2010; Plutchick, 2001; Prinz, 2004a&b), and those who insist that the two involve distinct processes and should thus be studied separately (Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 1996). Other authors question BET’s lack of context sensitivity (Barrett, 2006; Russell, 2003): emotions can be expressed and experienced in various ways and their meanings shift depending on the situation. Still others have drawn attention to the BET methodology, which often employs a forced choice approach (generally between facial expressions and a given scenario). Indeed, research has shown that quite different responses may be given when participants are not constrained by emotional labelling (Russell, 1994). It has also been pointed out that the close correlations that are expected to occur between specific brain areas, autonomic nervous system activity, and the putative affect programs associated with basic emotions are often less consistent than hypothesized (Barrett, 2006). While advocates of BET have responded to such criticisms in various ways (e.g., Ekman & Cordaro, 2011), another more general problem remains concerning the rather arbitrary way basic emotion categories were originally introduced. To be clear, all of this does not negate the observation that emotional episodes involve recurring psycho-physical patterns of behavior that are indeed nameable, and that may bear striking similarities across individuals and groups. Rather, it suggests that we need to develop new approaches for studying such phenomena.Emotions as dynamic and emergentResearch based on DST suggests that emotional episodes may not be reducible to pre-given response mechanisms in the brain, but rather emerge through developmental processes spanning an integrated body-brain-environment network (Freeman, 2000; Lewis, 2000; 2005). Colombetti (2014, pp. 57-82) suggests three mutually informing levels of inquiry that may help us better understand how this is so. The first of these involves the development of the muscular linkages and coordinative structures associated with emotional expression (e.g., facial, vocal, limb, and hand movement). And indeed, research shows that the appearance of recurrent and meaningful patterns of expressive behavior in infants is not best understood wholly in terms of predetermined (i.e., genetic) developmental programs, but rather as emergent properties of the dynamic interaction of a range of environmental and bodily factors (Camras & Witherington, 2005; Fogel & Thelen, 1987). The second level draws on existing work in affective neuroscience that highlights the plasticity and self-organizing nature of neural structures (see Freeman, 1999; 2000). Here, emotional episodes are explored as patterns of convergence (basins of attraction) in the neural trajectories of an agent that may both stabilize and transform due to contingent shifts in the global constraints of the brain-body-world system. The third level focusses on environmental concerns, exploring how agents enact meaningful emotional engagements (i.e., recurrent patterns of relational behavior) with the things and people they interact with, and the situations they live through (Hsu & Fogel, 2003; Laible & Thompson, 2000). From this perspective, emotional episodes are not limited to the skull or the skin of the organism. There is, rather, a strong sense in which they ‘extend’ (Krueger, 2014; Krueger & Szanto, 2016; Slaby, 2014) into environments where agents co-enact meaningful worlds through forms of participatory sense-making (such as music; see Schiavio & De Jaegher, 2017). In brief, the DST approach explores the active and self-organizing nature of emotional experience as it develops across bodily, neural, and ecological dimensions, suggesting that while emotional episodes can indeed be unique to an individual organism, they may also emerge in ways that are shared between agents with similar biological/social needs and histories of interaction with the environment. Exploring the dynamics of musical emotionsIt should be noted that work in music cognition has already begun to develop DST approaches. For example, researchers (e.g., Large & Jones, 1999) have investigated how the neural dynamics associated with musical experience actively resonate and self-organize with those of the body and the environment in a recursive or ‘circular’ way. However, such ‘dynamic attending’ to music has been explored mostly in the context of rhythmic entrainment and pitch perception (e.g., Large et al., 2016; see also McGrath & Kelly, 1986). We suggest that future research could develop the emotional implications of this more fully. Indeed, this would contribute to a larger body of inter-disciplinary work that explores the creative, social, embodied, ecological, and developmental aspects of musical experience (DeNora, 2000; Leman, 2007; van der Schyff, 2015). For example, it has been shown that even in contexts that appear to be ‘passive’ (e.g., listening in a concert hall) people play active roles in shaping their engagements with musical environments (Clarke, 2005; Krueger, 2014) - e.g., by developing ‘metaphorical’, cross-modal, and ‘narrative’ relationships between various temporal, spatial, textural, bodily, social, ecological, and affective dimensions (see Johnson, 2005). Here, DST could be useful for exploring how such experiences are enacted, especially when integrated with phenomenological descriptions. This orientation could also be developed in contexts involving the production of music (performance, rehearsal, instrumental practice, and so on). Indeed, because musical performance clearly involves the integration of the three levels of description discussed above (bodily/neural/environmental), DST might be used to investigate and describe situations where two or more individuals participate in realizing the same musical event. This could involve the use of electrophysiological measurements in association with techniques such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which are increasingly adopted in the context of social cognition (Osaka et al., 2015; Pu et al., 2016). As fNIRS allows for the measurement of hemodynamic activities in participatory settings it could be particularly useful for exploring music-related activities in terms of interpersonal emotional dynamics. These could be analyzed in conjunction with audio and video recordings (to help capture sonic, bodily, and other environmental aspects); as well as through interviews with the participants to better understand how various forms of musically adaptive behavior might initiate (and be driven by) emotional episodes that are both recurrent and new, and how such episodes are experienced by the participants (e.g., as shared and/or as personal). Examples of similar data collection methods come from work by Walton and colleagues (2014; 2015) who have used DST to study perceptions of creativity in interacting musical improvisers (see also Borgo, 2005; Laroche & Kaddouch, 2015).In all, we suggest that a DST approach may better capture the (inter)active ways people enact emotional relationships with music, and how such experiences develop diachronically. That is, it may help us better understand how musical emotions emerge and transform developmentally in the context of people’s lives - where stable or recurrent patterns of behavior may come to be experienced in similar ways between embodied agents, and thus be subject to ‘loose’ labelling without being wholly pre-determined, fixed, or simply reducible to discrete categories. Likewise, it may also provide insights into the more idiosyncratic ways we engage emotionally with music – e.g., the conscious ways individuals seek out new approaches to music making as a means of creative expression, or as a way of enacting meaningful but highly personal embodied-emotional relationships (aesthetic, social, therapeutic) with the environments they inhabit (DeNora, 2000). ConclusionWhile BET-based approaches will continue to provide many useful insights in more controlled environments, we suggest that the DST perspective may better capture the manifold ways emotional engagement with music unfolds in the complex, embodied, and socially interactive contexts that characterize lived experience. Because this approach sees emotions as emergent and enacted, and not first in terms of pre-given categories or ‘affect programs’, it arguably sidesteps the problematic issue introduced above regarding whether musical emotions correspond with ‘basic’, ‘real’, or ‘everyday’ emotions. In line with this, it would be very interesting to see how the results of musical research that assume a basic emotion approach might be reinterpreted from a DST perspective. Additionally, DST might also shed light on important aspects of musical development in early childhood. Lastly, because DST-based research sees emotionality as inextricable from our embodied and social existence, it could have more general implications for areas such as music education and therapy - perhaps providing ways for teachers, students, therapists, and patients to better understand and discuss their engagements with music and its meaning for their lives.

In this paper, we take a critical look at the notion of musical qualia. Although different conceptions of qualia are often used by theorists to describe musical experience, there is little consensus as to just what this entails. Broadly speaking, some argue that qualia are best understood as pregiven attributes of the musical environment, whereas others insist that they are products of information processing confined within the boundaries of the skull. We critically examine these positions and consider how they align with recent work in cognitive science. Although our main goal is to contribute to a richer understanding of what musical experience entails, we present arguments that go beyond the sole domain of music, involving critical neuroscience, Gestalt psychology, and philosophy of mind. Indeed, because music spans such a wide range of human activity, it offers a rich experiential context where theories of cognition may be put to the test. With this in mind, we then explore an alternative embodied perspective that looks beyond dichotomous inner-outer schemas and information-processing frameworks. As we go, we suggest that embodied approaches to musical experience may offer more inclusive and holistic models that better reflect how people actually engage with and talk about music in their day-to-day lives. To conclude, we discuss the relevance of the embodied perspective for the notion of qualia and what such insights might mean for musical research and practice.

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: Enactive approaches highlight the deep interdependency of brains, action, agency, and environment in shaping the world we inhabit. This perspective goes beyond input-output models of cognition, postulating instead closed loops of action and perception framed by the agent-environment complementarity. As a unique, dynamical, system, no representational recovery is required for cognitive-behavioral experience to take place.