Kathleen Coessens

The Western history of aesthetics is characterised by tension between theory and practice. Musicians listen, play, and then listen more profoundly in order to play differently, adapt the body, and sense the environment. They become deeply involved in the sensorial qualities of music practice. Artistic practice refers to the original meaning of aesthetics - the senses. Whereas Baumgarten and Goethe explored the relationship between sensibility and reason, sensation and thinking, later philosophers of aesthetics deemed the sensorial to be confused and unreliable and instead prioritised a cognitive or objective approach. Written by authors from the fields of philosophy, composition, performance, and artistic practice, 'Sensorial Aesthetics in Music Practices' repositions aesthetics as a domain of the sensible and explores the interaction between artists, life, and environment. Aesthetics becomes a field of sensorial and embodied experience involving temporal and spatial influences, implicit knowledge, and human characteristics.

The development of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century has created a framework where issues concerning funding dynamics can be easily accommodated. It combines the historical-philosophical approach of Thomas Kuhn. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, [1962] ) with the sociological approach of Robert K. Merton The sociology of science. Theoretical and empirical investigations. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 267–278, [1942] ), linking the ‘exact’ sciences to economy and politics. Out of this came a new domain, namely the study of scientific practices : Science as practice and culture. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992). Given this broad theoretical framework, we will specify by looking at the case of STEM education and its variant Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics with Art education as an example par excellence. Without going into the technical details of the financial support of the projects, we prefer to open a philosophical debate on the way how policies on academic subjects influence a whole society and the personal life of both researchers and people/pupils involved in education.

It is a rather safe statement to claim that the social dimensions of the scientific process are accepted in a fair share of studies in the philosophy of science. It is a somewhat safe statement to claim that the social dimensions are now seen as an essential element in the understanding of what human cognition is and how it functions. But it would be a rather unsafe statement to claim that the social is fully accepted in the philosophy of mathematics. And we are not quite sure what kind of statement it is to claim that the social dimensions in theories of mathematics education are becoming more prominent, compared to the psychological dimensions. In our contribution we will focus, after a brief presentation of the above claims, on this particular domain to understand the successes and failures of the development of theories of mathematics education that focus on the social and not primarily on the psychological

It is a rather safe statement to claim that the social dimensions of the scientific process are accepted in a fair share of studies in the philosophy of science. It is a somewhat safe statement to claim that the social dimensions are now seen as an essential element in the understanding of what human cognition is and how it functions. But it would be a rather unsafe statement to claim that the social is fully accepted in the philosophy of mathematics. And we are not quite sure what kind of statement it is to claim that the social dimensions in theories of mathematics education are becoming more prominent, compared to the psychological dimensions. In our contribution we will focus, after a brief presentation of the above claims, on this particular domain to understand the successes and failures of the development of theories of mathematics education that focus on the social and not primarily on the psychological.

This chapter looks at the impact of recent societal approaches of knowledge and science from the perspectives of two rather distant educational domains, mathematics and music. Science’s attempt at ‘self-understanding’ has led to a set of control mechanisms, either generating ‘closure’—the scientists’ non-involvement in society—or ‘economisation’, producing patents and other lucrative benefits. While scientometrics became the tool and the rule for measuring the economic impact of science, counter movements, like the slow science movement, citizen science, empowering music-art initiatives and other critical approaches focus on intrinsic and ethical questions of education and knowledge. Thinking about knowledge and research in terms of quantifiable products impacts heavily upon the domains of science and arts, while the complexity of knowledge acquisition forces society to consider also other parameters like equality, personal development and participatory processes.

Experimental encounters in music and beyond opens a necessary dialogue on experimental practices in the arts and negotiates their place in contemporary society. Going beyond the music-historical usage of the term "experimental", this book reimagines experimentation as an open working definition encompassing multiple forms of artistic attitudes and processes. The texts, images, and sounds offer multiple traces, faces, and spaces, revealing what experimentalism in music and the wider arts entails today. With perspectives from a range of disciplines - from choreography through composition to philosophy and beyond - the different experiences and artistic projects documented and discussed explore the complexity of experimentation in a way that is all the richer for being never-ending."--Page 4 of cover.

In this chapter we analyse two interrelated projects across the fields of visual art and music, philosophy and anthropology. Calendar Variations is a visual activity initiated by Anne Douglas, visual artist and researcher. A Day in My Life mirrors this activity in music and is developed by Kathleen Coessens, pianist and philosopher. The two projects are research driven and frame questions about the relationship of improvisation to experiential knowledge. First, what might experimentation be in the context of experience of life and experience of art? Does improvisation as a concept and a practice offer new potential to inform experimentation in a distinctive way? We will use Dewey as a starting point for a phenomenological approach to experience as a form of ongoing experimentation and adjustment, a process of learning endemic to life itself. We will map this articulation onto Hallam and Ingold’s four characteristics of improvisation. These closely resonate with Dewey while nuancing/inflecting the resulting learning as an experience between people, formed socially and culturally. Moving deeper into experience, experiment, and improvisation as three key interrelated concepts, we look briefly at Bergson, who offers a way of imagining experience as time dependent: life is constantly in a process of formation that is unstoppable even in reflection. This implies a conflation of intuition and intellect into one single activity, leaving the artist-as-researcher in a paradoxical situation. How is knowledge created if we cannot look back on experience by stepping outside what is ongoing? Arnheim helps us to unravel this paradox: intellect and intuition are distinctive but interrelated modes of being. We limit ourselves in life, Arnheim argues, to what is useful and necessary to know, working within this contingent. Art enriches possible ways of imagining. These challenge and extend experience. We lay out this theoretical ground as the basis from which to analyse the two artistic projects. By interpolating between the theoretical and artistic experiences, we enlarge not only our perspectives on but also our actions in the world.

How do artists share, translate, reveal their imagination by using different semiotic systems; how can the audience partake in this imagination receiving only images, words, notation, sounds? Starting from artwork of the novelist Italo Calvino and the composers Helmut Lachenmann and Gyorgy Kurtag, this article addresses the relation among imagination, perception, remembrance and expression. The ‘images’ used, be they visual, verbal, auditory or haptic, are much more than images. They concentrate in themselves layers of subjective and intersubjective perceptual, cognitive and emotive experiences. I will argue that imagination relies upon sensory fluidity. This allows us (1) to integrate sensorial experiences from different perceptual origins — synaesthesia, (2) to link past, present and future by way of sensorial and embodied patterns of remembrance — embodied sedimentation, and (3) to share intersubjective patterns of affect and effect, bridging idiosyncratic and universal human experiences.