title: Playing without mental representations: Embodied navigation and the GesTCom as a case study for radical embodied cognition in piano performance
Creators: name: Antoniadis, Pavlos
name: Chemero, Anthony
Publisher: name: Universität Graz
Year: 2020

description: Background in performance, musicology and music interaction. Score-based piano
performance practices remain attached to a paradigm of textual interpretation, which is founded
on the mental representability of music notation. This paradigm has been challenged by
developments in contemporary music, musicology and technology. The performative and
embodied cognitive turns in musicology redefine the complexity of the musical act beyond its
encapsulation in a text. The primacy of multimodal interactions in complex musical systems, the
central role of embodiment in performance, and the mediation of the musical act through
technology are parameters that render music notation open and invite us to reflect on the very
essence of its mental representability.
Background in cognitive science. Although the discipline initially focused solely on
computational manipulations of mental representations as an explanation of our minds, cognitive
scientists have increasingly looked elsewhere for explanatory tools. This noncomputational
cognitive science is the background for this paper. In particular, we focus on nonlinear dynamical
models of human perception and action, which aim to explain cognition as the change over time
of coupled brain-body-environment systems. These models explicitly reject the claim that
cognition is computational manipulation of representations. Our explanation of score-based
piano performance similarly rejects both computationalism and representationalism, offering
concepts and tools for the development of a theory of embodied interaction with the musical
score.
Aims. To argue that the role of mental representability in learning complex notated piano music
can be outsourced to the embodied interaction between symbolic and environmental information;
to do so against both the traditional textual interpretation paradigm and predictive processing in
embodied cognition; to present the GesTCom interactive system and argue that it makes a
convincing case for radical embodied cognition in piano performance; to explore reciprocal
relationships between radical embodied cognition and complex music performance.
Main contribution. We propose a novel paradigm of pianists’ interaction with complex music
notation defined as embodied navigation (Antoniadis, 2018). Its novelty lies in rethinking the
classic notion of textual interpretation as embodied interaction, and musical performance itself
as a dynamic system. In the radical version of the embodied navigation model, and in line with
the radical embodied cognition (Chemero, 2009), the processing of the musical text can be
explained even without the need for mental representations, as dynamic interaction between the
elements of the system: body, mind, instrument, notation and interactive systems. This embodied
navigation paradigm is materialized in the GesTCom (Gesture Cutting through Textual
Complexity) (Antoniadis, 2018), a dedicated interactive system for learning notated music. It is
a modular, sensor-based environment for the analysis, processing and real-time control of
complex piano notation through multimodal recordings. The system optimizes the performer's
learning experience through longitudinal multimodal documentation, real-time activity
monitoring with augmented feedback, and adaptation of notation’s complexity to the user's
developing skills.