Embodied music cognition and mediation technology

O VER THE PAST 25 YEARS OUR UNDERSTANDING of how music interacts with the human mind and brain has grown rapidly, and multimedia technologies have augmented the ways in which we engage with music. In Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, Marc Leman examines how these developments might be unified into something that is simultaneously a theory of music cognition and a blueprint for the music mediation technology of the future. Mediation refers to the mappings between the intentions and desires on the part of active musical participants and the technology that renders the music. The main mediating principle elaborated on in the monograph, which is more intellectual discourse than textbook, is rooted in the belief that musical interactions are socially charged, embodied affairs. Thus, individuals understand music in the same way that they understand others’ intentions during social interaction, and expressive intentions are attributed to music because patterns of sonic energy evoke bodily gestures that are meaningful to an individual due to his or her personal history as an active participant within a cultural environment. The first three chapters contextualize the embodied music cognition approach. In Chapter 1, Leman sets the scene by making clear the challenges that face those who are concerned with how subjective musical experiences are linked to physical sound patterns. Chapter 2 then deals with the diversity of paradigms that are relevant to the business of interdisciplinary music research. Here Leman adeptly identifies relationships between trends in music research, such as the emergence of systematic musicology, and landmark developments in the discipline of psychology, such as the advent of the Gestalt school and cognitivism. He also charts the progress made in the fields of technology, information theory, and computational modeling, with well selected philosophical matter visited along the way. This serves as a historical prelude to the birth of the modern embodied cognition paradigm, which asserts that, “knowledge does not emerge from passive perception, but from the need to act in an environment” (p. 43). In Chapter 3, Leman expands upon this ecological theme with a view toward music mediation technology, developing the premise that mediating technology should exploit the way in which individuals naturally engage themselves with music. The ensuing chapters delve into the details of what embodied music cognition means. Chapters 4 and 5 build a case for why it makes sense to think about engagement with music in terms of corporeal articulations and action-based ontologies, and how these lead to pleasurable experiences with music, whereas Chapters 6 and 7 describe how this type of framework might play itself out in musical instrument and music retrieval technologies. Throughout these chapters, Leman articulates a framework in which performer/music/listener interactions can be structured/mediated. The framework contends with the formidable challenges inherent in mapping between the intentions, actions, and percepts of individuals and very specific musical signals. Ultimately, the problem is one of identifying relationships between semantics and musical structure, and then specifying the technological requirements for accomplishing the translation from one to the other. Leman breaks the problem down into three interacting conceptual levels, which he talks about as first-person, second-person, and third-person descriptions. Thirdperson descriptions are objective representations of the structural features of the music, whereas first-person descriptions are subjectively assigned semantic labels that refer to expressive intentions. According to Leman, previous approaches to understanding music (e.g., traditional musicology) have fixated upon these two levels of description without giving adequate treatment to the “rules” that govern the mapping between objective representations and subjective interpretations. Such rules are needed to achieve his scientific goal of developing a complete theory of music, as well as his practical goal of developing a successful mediation technology. The key to Leman’s solution is the proposal that an understanding of musical intentions requires third-person and first-person descriptions to be linked via second-person descriptions, which are corporeal in nature. At this intermediate level, expressive bodily gestures from an individual’s repertoire of actions are used to describe moving sonic forms in a manner that the individual can interpret based on his or