Musicking, embodiment and participatory enaction of music: outline and key points

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a way of understanding the confluence of the enactive approach to cognition and musicology in a wider sense. The implication is that existing socio-cultural approaches to meaning in music – whereby music is seen as a total social phenomenon, and the naturalistic view of music cognition may be articulated via the life-mind continuum proposed by enactivism. On the one hand, discussions on embodied music cognition are presented with the opportunity to overcome their de facto individualism in a principled, naturalistic way. On the other hand, for the socio-cultural-historical approaches the opportunity seems to be to move beyond the biology-culture divide without submitting to reductionism. A wider explanatory unit is presented. The explanatory utility of embodiment is examined in relation to the wider frame of social-life in dialectical fashion. A definition of musicking is sketched considering it as an instance of processes of social-life. This paper signals a direction to take, yet methodologies, results, and homologies with other disciplines are left open to further discussion.

KEYWORDS:

• Enactive cognition
• embodied mind
• music
• meaning
• participatory sense-making
• autonomy

Preamble

In the seminal work “How musical is man” (1973) musicologist John Blacking proposed to understand musicality and musical systems as comprising not only the organisation of sounds but also the organisation of human relationships that give shape to music as a wide and rich activity. Now, more than 40 years after Blacking’s work, the study of music – that is, music as a complex human activity – far from being an unified area, is at best a pluralist archipelago of academic enquiry (see Born, 2010, for a sociological discussion). Yet, as long as the pervasive biology/culture (or nature/history) divide is held in place, a link between different explanatory levels (e.g. between research on music perception-action and music sociology) is not only missing but impossible. Thus, mired in ontological, epistemological, and methodological divisions the formulation of a more comprehensive view regarding how we know music and how meaning becomes attached to (or is conveyed by) music is out of reach (see Clarke, Dibben, & Pitts, 2010, p. 74, for a discussion). In order to overcome this impasse, music – its cognition and meaning – needs to be thought in the light of principled approaches that respect the relational, affect-laden, multi-temporal and multi-agent domain where it happens. This paper presents the enactive approach to cognition as the best framework to tackle the issue and make sense of the existing literature in sociological and anthropologically informed musicology. As a point of departure, I take musicologist Christopher Small’s definition of music as a verb, namely Musicking (Small, 1998, p. 9), to be a paradigmatic antecedent for a definition of music understanding in enactive terms. For Small:

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organised sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning, but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance  …  (p. 13).

In this paper, I propose that this notion of musicking needs to be expanded beyond the “online” encounter in the performance event. In line with enactivism, I suggest starting the discussion of music cognition (cognition henceforth paired with affect) and the question of meaning and value by considering musicking as a wider process and a genre of social-life. This is firstly a way of explicitly taking distance from the ontological and methodological individualism that underlies most approaches to music cognition which are often uncritically reductionist. What needs to be avoided is the view that frames music cognition as a matter of the problem-solving capabilities of an agent – often abstract and universal – seen alone in a reduced sonic medium. Thus, this paper points to one way of moving forward by examining the explanatory utility of the widespread notion of embodiment in the theory of music cognition in relation to the wider frame of social-life. This paper foregrounds their close co-definition in dialectical or circular fashion. Here, a more powerful theoretical framework is afforded by the “autopoietic” enactive approach to cognition (see Stewart, Gapenne, & Di Paolo, 2010; Thompson, 2007; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) (see Matyja & Schiavio, 2013; Schiavio, 2014a, 2014b, for a thorough complementary view). According to this approach, embodiment needs to be articulated with other core concepts that inform the life-mind continuity thesis (Thompson, 2007). Among other enactive concepts, the ones I will be using here are: autonomy, sense-making, emergence, experience, value, normativity (Barandiaran, Di Paolo, & Rohde, 2009; Cappuccio & Froese, 2014; Di Paolo, Rohde, & De Jaegher, 2010); participatory sense-making (PSM) and interaction (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007; De Jaegher, Di Paolo, & Gallagher, 2010; De Jaegher & Froese, 2009); social enaction (Froese & Di Paolo, 2009); adaptivity, precariousness, and primordial tension (Di Paolo, 2005; Jonas, 1966).

This proposal has an interdisciplinary premise: a link between levels of explanation – from the micro or behavioural to the macro or sociocultural – is still greatly missing, however, it is not an impossibility. This paper aims at sketching part of that missing link. Current experimental formats still constrain the evidence to a limited view of the phenomenon, nonetheless, some results point to the right direction (e.g. Walton, Richardson, Langland-Hassan, & Chemero, 2015). The purpose of this paper, however, is not to present a comprehensive discussion over empirical findings. Rather, in what follows I suggest a possible conceptual route in four brief points (emphasised within the text). The first point sets up a domain (unit) of analysis; the second posits a condition on the notion of embodiment; the third points towards the necessary dialectics of social-life; the fourth sketches a definition of musicking that will serve as reference for further investigations. I conclude with some observations.

The social life of music and the whereabouts of cognition

The formulation Musicking = social-life resonates with core ideas found within the socio-cultural spectrum of the study of music. What these approaches share is a preoccupation with the way music permeates and is permeated by the larger setting of human activity in society. The idea of the intimate, overlapping relation of music and social life has been one of the core thesis of the new musicology emerging in the 1990s (see Cook, 1990; DeNora, 2000; Frith, 1996; Small, 1998; also Borgo, 2005; Turino, 2008), which itself was substantially based on previous seminal works in Ethnomusicology (see Blacking, 1973; Feld, 1990; Merriam, 1964; Nettl, 1983/2005). In the strongest sense of this overlapping, music is neither a practice abstracted from the social, nor is the social something other than the actual practices of groups of people. In the work of Frith (1996), for example, concerned with phenomena of “fandom” and taste in rock scenes and popular music, personal and group identities are seen not so much being simply expressed through the music (as if music were a “code” for existing identities) as they are constructed by it. Similarly, DeNora (2000) describes the ways in which music permeates the everyday idiosyncratic practices of individuals (e.g. the use of music in the gym, or pain self-management) suggesting that music can be conceptualised as a “technology of the self” (p. 47) (see Krueger, 2014, for an interesting approach to this from an “Extended Mind” position).

I suggest that what most new-ethno-socio-musicologists emphasise, in one way or another, are the complex ways in which heterogeneous parts (persons, technologies, institutions, etc.) co-determine one another and form larger networks that may exhibit tendencies and global behaviours of their own. The properties that can be described within these networks are relational: the intricate ways in which the parts imply one another for their definition (see Born, 2010). Crucially, what many of these aforementioned authors have described is not simply the larger context where music cognition happens to take place. Contrarily, the relational domain they describe – “in the wild” (Hutchins, 1995) – largely corresponds with full credentials to the very explanatory level of an embodied, dynamicist and enactive approach to music cognition. Otherwise put, the networks (of human activity, material engagements, institutional procedures, etc.) should not be understood as the exterior and pregiven contexts where cognitive agents simply meet and carry on with their interior cognitive processes. These networks are instead the cognitive domains that need to be addressed, in their full complexity, in our inquiries on music cognition.

Under this light, questions from musicology regarding music’s meaning, that is, questions related to the processes of creation of value or significance for experiencing agents within socio-cultural domains of musical activity, acquire a refreshing depth of field. As an echo of Small’s insight on musical meaning, ethnomusicologist Becker (2004) defines a unit of analysis for musicking in her inquiry on the processes of significance in Balinese musical trancing:

Trancing and music underlie the phenomenological necessity of understanding our experiences as including more than our bounded, unitary selves. Although only one person may be trancing, and only a few may be musicking, the total event is the unit of analysis, not just the trancer, nor just the musicians  …  The advantages of this approach are that we are discouraged from trying to look inside a particular brain/body to find the answers to the special aura that such events have, but are looking rather at the aura of the whole. The event is not coded in the culture or even in an individual. It is an enactment, a performance by particular groups of persons who continually restructure each other and subsequent events. (pp. 122–123, my emphasis)

Taking this cue from Becker, I suggest my First point – A step: musical meaning and understanding are not problems of the information-processing kind but of living relational processes. Thus, the notion of musicking (as process and network) hits at the appropriate level of analysis needed for explanations of music cognition – respectful of its ecological complexity – to be fruitful: the relational-cognitive domain.

This first step thus implies a bold decision: to acknowledge that cognition is not simply something “in the head” (Bateson, 1972/2000; Varela et al., 1991), rather we are in cognitive-affective processes that pertain to the relational domain of organisms with the world. More concretely, brains, bodies, environment “constrain one another to achieve adaptive behaviour” (Colombetti, 2013, p. 56; Kelso, 1995). For Gallagher and Bower (2014),

on the Enactive view, the explanatory unit of perception (or cognition, or action, etc.) is not the brain, or even two (or more) brains in the case of social cognition, but a dynamic relation between organisms, which include brains, but also their own structural embodied features that enable specific perception-action loops involving social and physical environments, which in turn effect statistical regularities that shape the structure and function of the nervous system. (p. 242)

Having specified the meeting point between the unit of analysis proper to a relational musicology and the explanatory unit of cognition from the enactive perspective, it is possible to address the use of the notion of embodiment here.

Embodiment: not that easy!

Embodiment (firstly I refer to the variety of notions across disciplines) is not such a useful idea when it points to a kind of “rediscovery” of body features that can be recombined to fill the gaps of cognitive processes (as in orthodox cognitive science), and the production of cultural meaning and subjectivity (as in discourse-centred socio-cultural theories). Perhaps it helps to remember that from Descartes, and the European tradition that followed, the body was never “forgotten”. It played instead the humble yet important role of a faithful servant of the mind. Thus, a rediscovering of an influential and mediating body or the reconciliation of body and mind is simply the re-foundation of Cartesian dualism. In the words of enactivists:

the widespread use of the term [embodiment] has led in some cases to the loss of the original contrast with computationalism and even to the serious consideration of trivial senses of embodiment as mere physical presence … It is not only a question of moving the mind from a highly sheltered realm of computational modules in the head into messy bodily structures. So-called embodied approaches that do not move beyond this first step remain largely functionalist and see the body as yet another information processing device … This is a Cartesian view of embodiment in its separation between mind as function on the one hand and body as implementation on the other … . (Di Paolo et al., 2010, p. 42)

The study of music is not exempt from these issues. On the one hand, important proposals on Embodied Music Cognition (Leman, 2007; Leman & Maes, 2014) fail to overcome convincingly this kind of “Cartesian embodiment” (see Geeves & Sutton, 2014; Matyja & Schiavio, 2013; Schiavio, 2014a, 2014b, for a critique of Leman’s view [2007]). The body is still seen as mediating between the overt physicality of musical environments (e.g. playing an instrument, etc.) and musically contentful mental states. Otherwise put, this view simply adopts a “weak embodiment” thesis (see Ziemke, 2001, for an identification of degrees of embodiment) whereby a body is simply required to enable phenomenological and cognitive properties of the mind. The realm of the production of meaning and understanding remains locked inside, and depends on processes that are only temporarily coupled – “online” and causally – with events “outside”.

On the other hand, in socio-cultural-historic approaches (i.e. Arts/Humanities), embodiment in music appears to parallel the view of the body as a mediator or means for other rather more important and disembodied processes. Specifically, the body is put back into the picture of social and cultural production of discourse, image, and meaning. The critique of “Cartesian embodiment” above shall be extended here. Succinctly put,

the body is mostly seen as a means for the cultural production of signification; as a place where social relations, media practices, power struggles, violence, pleasure, but also traditions and habits are produced and/or “inscribed”. Embodiment, in this view, serves the production of signs. The “meaning” of signs, though, is by definition something absent, something referred to, or constructed in the act of referring to it, that is, something that can be viewed either as already disembodied or as a process of disembodiment. (Klemm, Schomacher, & Söffner, 2011, p. 320)

Here the body is meant to be read as a “text”. Thus, the task of the researcher is to find out what is being communicated through the body. Habits, behaviours, and rituals “end up being arbitrary and incidental” to semantic processes (McGraw, 2015, p. 38). As a text, the body is seen as a mediator for other domains (social, cultural, historical, etc.).

Crucially, it seems that across the spectrum of music study, embodiment (weak version) tells the story of the body in terms of influence, mediation, or instrumentalism; that is, in terms of its contingent, contextual and or enabling role. Because it is not difficult to point to the – frequently overt – physicality of music (trivially it implies moving-bodies at least at some moment) embodiment seems to be taken for granted. Thus my Second point – A requirement: Existing notions of embodiment in music research remain under-qualified to operate at the explanatory level that is most needed – the relational domain – in a truly non-dualistic naturalistic fashion. If we want a positive account of embodiment that serves to establish an operational link across disciplines what is required is a view that gives the body a strong constitutive role within core processes of cognition and meaning.

Ziemke (2001) identifies a more restrictive (stronger) version of embodiment that comprises other weaker levels of embodiment, namely: structural coupling (Maturana & Varela, 1980); historical embodiment; physical or sensorimotor embodiment (i.e. sensor-motor loops). The strong version (i.e. organismic embodiment) is posited on the fundamental properties of living beings. Dynamic self-organisation and self-production are life’s fundamental properties that are realised at different levels of the organism and with distinct degrees of openness to the world (Di Paolo et al., 2010; Thompson, 2007, pp. 37, 383). A living body is not a machine for which its organisation (e.g. the connections between sensors and motors) is conceived and governed externally to it (see Nasuto, Bishop, Roesch, & Spencer, 2015 for a discussion of heteronomy in artificial intelligence (AI)). Instead, organisms are precisely always in the business of realising their own organisation and re-production, that is, in the business of sustaining their autonomy. The crux of Enactivism’s insights is that this autonomy is by no means equal to cognitive solipsism or robust independence, contrarily, an organism’s autonomy – its operational closure that differentiates it from the surroundings – can only be maintained in the form of needy openness to the world under precarious conditions (Di Paolo, 2005). Moreover, an organism is never simply neutrally coupled with the environment, rather, its openness is fundamentally manifested as “concern” (Jonas, 1966, p. 80; Weber & Varela, 2002), whereby precarious conditions imply bringing forth vital values. This openness is ipso facto the self-production of phenomenal experience: the dynamical co-emergence of a significant world and a centre of concern. Embodiment is then defined in terms of experiencing-living bodies; in terms not simply of functional structures coupled with elements of the environment but as organisms in the ongoing activity of self-maintenance that includes specific dimensions of directedness, affectivity, and awareness (Colombetti, 2013; Gallagher & Zahavi, 2007; Thompson, 2007; see specially Husserl, 1970; Merleau-Ponty, 2002, who provide tools to conceptualise the body not simply as an objective Körper, but as a Leib – an experiencing living body with different levels of self-awareness).

Enactivism offers a more useful way for understanding (and operationalising) a relational explanatory unit in both dynamicist and phenomenological terms in mutual correspondence. Up to this point, embodiment needs to be seen entangled with autonomy, experience, dynamic emergence, and sense-making. In a way, embodiment is not only “not easy” but also not enough. A theory of (embodied) musicking cognition should not only address music’s obvious structural coupling but also musicking vis-à-vis a strong notion of embodiment via insights about the self-maintenance of the autonomy of full blown musicking persons.

“Autopoietic” enactivism as a decisive turn to social-life

If the preliminary notion of musicking offered in the first point is correct, musical meaning and understanding remains underdetermined by the local occurrence of sonic events and an individual’s concrete action-perception loops. As a reminder, musicking persons have multiple musical identities, share taste distinctions, participate in musical scenes, in short, they accumulate shared narratives, patterns of emotion, and habits of listening that are deployed as part and parcel of a rich communal social-life. Contemporary views on embodied music cognition however inherit the de facto individualism of orthodox cognitive science and thus take for granted a generic social context (cf. Leman, 2007). Contrarily, a deeper co-definition of embodiment and sociality needs to be taken seriously, as Moran (2014) states “Having acknowledged the central role of bodies and human movement to cognition, we must not assume that the concomitant matters of social context and the performance of our social relationships are taken care of” (p. 8). Embodiment and spatio-temporal embeddedness in socio-cultural domains constrain and enable each other. Already from its inception in Varela et al. (1991) the (Autopoietic) enactive view is concerned with the entanglement of bodies, experience, and social history. Once cognition (sense-making) is grounded in the life sustaining activity of the body, as opposed to de-contextualised information processes, sociality is necessarily brought to the table. Moreover, the explanatory gap between basic action-perception and higher abstract thought cannot be overcome without this move (De Jaegher & Froese, 2009).

In order to elaborate the move towards social-life two important discussions need to be introduced. On the one hand, an ontological grounding on the continuity thesis (Froese & Di Paolo, 2009; Thompson, 2007). On the other hand, a dynamical systems and phenomenological understanding of the dialectics of sociality based on the concept of PSM (De Jaegher et al., 2010; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007; Fuchs & De Jaegher, 2009). Uncontroversially, persons need to relate to pre-existing socio-cultural settings (Steiner & Stewart, 2009). However, there’s a risk of taking the socio-cultural domain as a set of contextual constraints (normative frameworks) externally imposed on the individual (e.g. via institutional instruction). Conventionally, those constraints tend to be characterised by their arbitrary relation to bodily constraints (metabolic and otherwise) in what seems to perpetuate the pervasive biology/culture divide (see Ingold, 2000, p. 153). Contrarily, the continuity thesis proposes that distinctions between metabolic, non-metabolic and social processes can be held (for methodological clarity) without requiring ontological gaps. Thus, the relation of individuals with pre-existing socio-cultural settings needs not be presented as an arbitrary heteronomy radically separated from biological autonomy. From the previous discussion on enactive/strong embodiment we observed that a living system’s constraints should not be understood as being externally imposed. Instead, living beings are precisely in the business of production and maintenance of their own values and norms within viability boundaries (Di Paolo, 2005). Life is expanded in the social and what remains invariant through change across different domains – metabolic, behavioural, developmental – are those organisational properties of living. In Thompson’s words (2007): “life and mind share a set of basic organizational properties, and the organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life” (p. 128). The continuity thesis links the topology of cell-life to the dialectics of social-life, in specific, to the co-definition of Self and other proper to social cognition and intersubjectivity (Froese & Di Paolo, 2011). The Self-Umwelt phenomenal topology is one fundamental aspect of the sense-making entity (Thompson, 2007, p. 72, 158). Crucially, it needs to be understood as a relational property – a process of co-emergence – rather than as an aggregate of a pregiven Self and a given world. What is needed then is to direct our attention to the dynamics of the emergence of normativity and the incorporation of pre-existing constraints within systems comprising more than one individual, as well as to the intersubjective emergence of a Self in a world with Others.

The notion of PSM is a key step in this direction (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). PSM proposes that social interactions can be transformative of the participants’ sense-making in ways that are not accessible to each individual on their own. “Social interactions can take on an autonomy of themselves” (De Jaegher & Froese, 2009, p. 456), that is, emergent structures occur in the multi-agent coordination of actions that cannot be attributed to each agent’s individual performance. Evidence of autonomous interactive dynamics is available in experiments in AI with minimal agents (simulation models in Froese & Di Paolo, 2010, 2011) and unidimensional environments for human agents (Perceptual crossing experiments, see Auvray & Rohde, 2012; Froese, Iizuka, & Ikegami, 2014; Lenay & Stewart, 2012). Furthermore, in Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher (2014), the authors propose that the co-existence of different kinds of autonomies (the individual’s and the interaction’s) manifest a primordial tension – a double normativity – that cannot be managed by an individual on their own (the individual can only modulate their couplings in relation to their self-normativity). To follow the norms of the interaction is to do it necessarily jointly with others, hence, to be able to modulate the interaction is to jointly bring forth social agency. In this way, by means of a dialectic and recursive process, PSM can acquire more complex forms of intersubjectivity beyond the local face-to-face encounter. At the historically thicker end of this conceptualisation, individuals are seen incorporating the normativity of communal social-life into their own autonomy (as opposed to simply having the input of an external constraint). Moreover, because a full blown person can only be conceived relationally (relating to the constraints of a social order which also imposes viability conditions), it is then possible to say that complex forms of PSM not only transform individuals’ sense-making but give shape to those individuals altogether: individuals arise out of intersubjectivity (Froese & Di Paolo, 2011).

The embodied autonomy of a (musicking) person – their self-sustained organisation of metabolic and non-metabolic processes – is an achievement of a history of interactions in the strong sense that these interactions in part shape or constitute that person’s agency, social cognition and identity (see De Jaegher et al., 2010; De Jaegher & Froese, 2009; Froese & Di Paolo, 2009). Intersubjectivity is not a different pool of “building blocks”, nor an added layer over an otherwise fully functional individualistic substrate. Thus, the sensorimotor coupling of bodily structures with a sonic environment cannot be the alpha and omega of a theory of embodied musicking sense-making. Third point – A direction: to avoid the explanatory gap between basic action-perception loops and more complex sense-making the notion of embodiment needs to be even more restrictive (only applicable to encultured organisms). Under the light of social-life (the joint and participatory maintenance of persons’ identities) it turns out that the overemphasis on the bodily structures of individuals responds to an unnecessary conceptual requirement. A more fruitful direction is to consider the dynamic conflicts, asymmetries and synergies in the historically thick entanglement of self-normative bodily Selves and self-normative socialities under precarious conditions across the life-society continuum. One way to make concrete steps in this direction is to look at how musicking habits are learnt within concrete communities of practice. Anthropological and sociological approaches to social practice have already provided valuable insights on the processes of learning as participation in changing practice (Hutchins, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991), and knowledge as skilled practice (Ingold, 2000, p. 291; 2011). Research questions should address, for example, how listening habits (habit defined as “self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor coordination”, Barandiaran, 2008, p. 281; in Egbert & Barandiaran, 2014) are enabled and reinforced by larger dynamics of increasing participation in specific group practices (e.g. participation in musical “scenes”). I will not expand on this here, yet once again, the lesson to be learnt is about the need for an interdisciplinary approach. I suggest that a further step towards a definition of musicking in enactive terms is still necessary in order to ground such an approach.

Musicking sense-making

Fourth point – Towards a definition: (a) Musicking is a genre of (social) relational practice and as such it needs to be defined in the domain of social-life and in accordance with the ontological continuity thesis; it is an enriched version of those processes fundamental to life (i.e. value generation and autonomy). (b) Musicking pertains to ontogeny (of developmental systems) and as such it is a process of individuation: in the ongoing musicking process, sonic surfaces, and subjectivities constantly come into being together. (c) Musicking comprises multi-temporal, multi-layered, mutually constrained processes – the global is brought to bear on local phenomena and both global and local co-realise.

Very briefly expanded: From (a); Understanding musicking sense-making as an inter-individual relational and always ongoing practice flies in the face of the predominant view that social coordination of musical behaviour is merely a subspecies of intra-individual implementation and use of information processing modules. The starting point of a nonreductive understanding of music is right in the middle of music’s socialities and value generation. This requires a definition that changes the subject in question, from an individual juxtaposed to an environment (i.e. seen picking up and processing information from the environment) to a multi-agent-system-of-value-enaction. Value here is necessarily linked to the integrity-in-change (identity) of the individual’s autonomy. What needs to be described are the ways in which individual autonomy is not only constrained by pre-existing social norms but also maintained and expanded uniquely by social emergent dynamics. Putting (b) in (a); the “juxtaposed individual” is then only the momentary instantiation of those ongoing processes at the social-relational domain. The presumption of a pregiven sonic world to which the organism has adapted is unwarranted. Instead what needs to be adopted is a kind of parsimony whereby the abundance of statistical regularities that correlate sonic structures and sub-personal dynamics are part of the explananda (not the explanans). Moreover, how an inter-individual practice becomes understood as being focused on sonic (phenomenal) salient features has to be explained in terms of the co-emergence of organism-world-with-others. A sonic-musical world is brought forth in correspondence and within a participatory process of individuation. Otherwise put, the phenomenal and the organisational have a “thick” historical co-emergence: Music qua “organized sounds”, and “soundly organized” persons (Blacking, 1973) have a common ontogeny. From (b) in (c); the local can be distinguished from the global precisely at the point of a phenomenological self and other (via self-umwelt) topology. The task at this level is to correlate qualitative changes with changes in the interactive dynamics (e.g. timing and coordination transitions) and, furthermore, with the organisational properties of communities of practice (e.g. the states of affiliation and participation in enduring social practices). To think of a global-to-local determination is to bring the long-range history of interaction and intersubjectivity to bear on the narrow timescale of the local phenomena. Back to (a); it is the insight about the co-emerging of multiple levels of normativity in social-life which sheds light on the multi-temporal – and ontologically continuous – nature of musicking processes.

With this approximation to a definition of musicking my intention is to establish a continuity between levels of analysis by means of connecting: a relational explanatory unit (at the confluence of socio-cultural approaches to music and socially informed approaches to cognition); a strong version of embodiment (restricted to organismic autonomy); and a view of social-life as constitutive of sense-making (via the co-emergence of multiple levels of normativity). I have not addressed, however, the ways to operationalise this definition. To do so would require a much more collective interdisciplinary project than is possible here. It is still to be seen how the tools and methodologies may be implemented in the proposed study of musicking under the naturalistic principles found in Enactivism (see Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2015).

Final observations

Contemporary embodied-enactive music cognition needs to take seriously a consideration of the achievements of socio-cultural-historic approaches to music. Because persons’ historical “thickness” (Buhrmann, Di Paolo, & Barandiaran, 2013, p. 13) is nested in relational domains involving multiple bodies, tools, external representations (Hutchins, 2010, p. 429), etc., we need to readdress cultural questions of musicking in terms of the multiple scales pertaining to those relational systems’ dynamics. These may be interdependent scales that range from the very short and fast – i.e. the coupling of musculoskeletal dynamics in bodies and synaptic integration in brains – to the very long and slow – i.e. participation in community, group affiliation and cultural identities. Whereas current research in music cognition focuses on the short range of the phenomena in live interaction (e.g. Walton et al., 2015), seemingly facilitated by the fact that these correlations fit the existing format of experimental laboratories at psychology departments, the link to the larger scales is still missing. I suggest the link seems to be persistently missed by methodological individualism (but see, for example, multi-agent and diachronic studies in Geeves, McIlwain, & Sutton, 2014; Schiavio & Høffding, 2015) and, in a deeper sense, by the chronic insistence on the biology/culture divide. The reversal of this is thus both methodological and ontological. I have tried to rehearse part of this reversal by bringing enactivism to the table, in particular, its ontological continuity thesis and the strong co-emergence claim, together with the conceptual tools it brings from dynamical systems theory and the post-Cartesian take on phenomenology.

I have suggested that the enactive approach to cognition is better suited to deal with the understanding of music, not only in its obvious physicality, but in its whole complexity. The enactive approach is respectful of both global complexity and localised individual variability and understands their systemic co-determination. Moreover, it seems possible to consider how this proposal may contribute to the more general discussion on (embodied) cognition. Crucially, musicking remains irreducibly social. It resists its crystallisation into the characteristic procedural truth-bearing semantic forms of the standard image of individualistic cogitations. Perhaps it is because of this irreducibility that musicking has not been paid due attention in serious discussions about the human mind (surprisingly so, even within the enactivist community). Its complexity remains deliberately obscured by an imposed aura of “primitivism”. Compared to the conventional view of language, musicking is still understood as a kind of more basic, parochial, and unsophisticated (non-semantic, non-cognitive) form of expressiveness and, at best, of social bonding. Contrarily, if we see in musicking open-ended processes of highly specialised joint creation of social-life, whereby complex personal identities grow and are fluidly interlaced with the enaction of intricate musical (sonic-kinetic) worlds, we may gain a valuable insight into the human mind in its grounding on species-specific life processes. Understanding musicking foregrounds individual subjects as leaking creatures – unfinished and open to the world (Ingold, 2013). In counterpoint to this, embodiment is thus addressed not as a way of talking about an universal, optimised, impersonal human body in relation to environmental invariances, but precisely as a way of talking about the universal disposition of living bodies to an enormous variability and plasticity expressed in relationships along life lines. This leads to a further consideration of the ethical dimension of embodiment in sociality (see Kyselo & Di Paolo, 2013; van der Schyff, 2015; Silverman, 2012; Urban, 2015). Finally, back to music studies, by aiming beyond traditional dichotomies (Objectivism/subjectivism, interior/exterior, nature/nurture, etc.) this outline can be seen as an offer made to other disciplines across the board to join forces (e.g. rethinking questions regarding body and gender in music). In this way, the outline also points to an interdisciplinary research that is governed by an “intrinsic necessity” to cross academic boundaries while avoiding the power asymmetries of externally conceived interdisciplinary projects.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Queen’s University International and Postgraduate Studentship 2013–2016.