Musical Imagery

R.I. Godoy, H. Jorgensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136647048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

An edited collection of papers which explore a large number of topics related to musical imagery. Musical imagery can be defined as our mental capacity for imagining sound in the absence of a directly-audible sound source, meaning that we can recall and re-experience or even invent new musical sound through our inner ear. The first part of the volume is focused on theoretical issues such as the history, epistemology, neurological bases, and cognitive models of musical imagery. The second part presents various applications of musical imagery in performance and composition, and provides the reader with a broad overview of the many musical activities which are concerned with musical imagery.;Musical imagery is a truly interdisciplinary subject, and it is the belief of the editors that a plurality of approaches, ranging from the introspective and philosophical to the experimental and computational, is the most fruitful strategy for exploring the subject of musical imagery.

I

Theoretical Perspectives

Rolf Inge Godøy and Harald Jørgensen

The first part of this book deals with some fundamental issues in musical imagery. Although there seems to be a broad consensus about the term ‘musical imagery’ as denoting images of musical sound in our minds, there are obviously many opinions on the nature of such images and on their relationship to perception and memory, and there are many explanations of how they work. Also, there are many, and rather different, approaches to investigating these images of musical sound in our minds.

Such a plurality of notions of what musical imagery is supposed to be, as well as of paradigms for exploration may perhaps seem confusing. There is of course a considerable distance not only in method, but also in fundamental attitudes, between for instance ‘arm chair’ style introspective approaches and various methods of brain activity measurements. As we know, such differences in approaches and fundamental attitudes are often encountered in other domains of the cognitive sciences as well. On the positive side, we can see these differences in approaches and attitudes as an expression of the composite and multifaceted nature of our topic. With this understanding, the plurality of notions and approaches becomes an asset rather than a liability, and we should read this book as a frame-by-frame exposure, from various angles, of this rich and essential topic that we think musical imagery is.

In line with this idea of a pluralism of approaches, the contribution of Albrecht Schneider and Rolf Inge Godøy (chapter 1) gives an overview of some important notions of imagery and musical imagery in the past, as well as a brief assessment of some challenges confronting us now and in the immediate future. The authors believe that some ideas manifest in phenomenological and Gestalt theoretical works of the nineteenth and twentieth century still have relevance. As an example, we can look at the issue of context in both perception and imagery. This was elegantly depicted of Brentano and later of Husserl in his tripartite model of retentions, primal impressions and protentions, meaning that there are always images of past experience and future expectancies exerting influence on what we perceive and imagine at any given moment. This, and similar ‘introspective’ insights are actually also epistemological questions, questions which reappear in experimental approaches to musical imagery.

Interestingly, expectancies and/or violations of expectancies are important ingredients in investigating the neurophysiological bases of musical imagery, as we can see in Petr Janata’s contribution (chapter 2). Another central issue is the relationship between imagery and more ‘primary’ perception, and Janata gives us a model for structuring our understanding of this as well as other central issues of the neurophysiological basis for musical imagery. Various methods for collecting data on brain activity during tasks of musical imagery, as well as various proposed models for the workings of musical imagery are presented in this chapter. In addition, the author presents some of his own observational findings.

Although there will always be a neurophysiological basis for musical imagery, the focus of Virpi Kalakoski (chapter 3) is on various experiments and models of human memory and faculties of imagery. The topic of memory is indissociable from that of imagery, and a number of ‘classical’ theories of memory are presented here, as well as some of the authors’ own experimental findings. As a conclusion, the author suggests that musical imagery is multimodular as well as multimodal, ideas that we find in several other contributions in this book.

We hope that these first three chapters will give the reader an overview of some basic epistemological-philosophical, neurophysiological, and cognitive issues of musical imagery, and by that preparing the ground for the following chapters. In the next three chapters we move on to consider in more detail what kinds of constraints and/or schemata might be at work in musical imagery. Is it possible to imagine the unimaginable, or is that a contradiction of terms? Or rather: Is everything that we can possibly imagine based upon bits and pieces of what we have already experienced in our lives, so that imagery is mostly a matter of making new combinations? And further more: Does whatever we imagine follow schemata that we all have learned during the long process of acculturation? And: Are there effects of context, both short-term and long-term, at work in imagery so that whatever we may imagine at a given moment, in a ‘now’, is actually conditioned by what we imagined a little while ago as well as by what we are expecting to imagine in the immediate future?

Posing these and similar questions shifts our attention towards the very content of our images of musical sound. Given what is known about constraints and schemata at work in other cognitive domains, it is not unreasonable to guess that such constraints and schemata are also at work in musical imagery. In the contribution of Marc Leman (chapter 4), the point of departure is what can be termed an ecological view of musical sound, perception and cognition. Here, the basis is the continuous, sub-symbolic acoustic substrate and the neurophysiological workings of audition, including the self-organizing behaviour of neurons. The paper presents a modeling of a ‘low-level’ basis for musical imagery, with higher level brain processes linked to this basis.

From a neurophysiological point of view, constraints on musical imagery should be detectable in the sense that there should be some kind of observable trace in cases where there is a ‘violation of expectancies’, i.e. where musical sound does not conform to schemata in our minds. This is the topic in the contribution of Christiane Neuhaus (chapter 5). She sets out to measure and interpret patterns of brain activity across different cultural groups. What may seem ‘right’ to one group, i.e. in accordance with learned schemata, may seem ‘wrong’ to another group, i.e. as a violation of learned schemata. The research of Neuhaus shows that neurophysiological responses to expected versus non-expected patterns in musical scales are different in groups of people from different cultures, and this makes it plausible to suggest that such culture specific schemata are also present in musical imagery.

Another aspect is how our learned, internal schemata work when we are confronted with acoustically highly complex and even ambiguous sounds in terms of pitch, as is the case with many inharmonic sounds. This is discussed in the contribution of Albrecht Schneider (chapter 6), and exemplified with inharmonic sounds from carillons. These sounds are analysed in view of acoustic properties such as spectral content and possibilities or impossibilities of having an unambiguous pitch. It seems that beyond a certain point of complexity, listening has to rely on some kind of simplification of the sound material. That is, we have to ‘overrule’ the acoustic material and make an ‘idealised’ or ‘stylised’ image of the musical sound by filtering out features which would otherwise lead to ambiguous images. This concerns the general question of the ecological versus the more schematic nature of our images of musical sound, something that can also be understood as a dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete in music (to borrow an expression of Pierre Schaeffer), ultimately related to a distinction between the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’ in musical thought.

Speaking of the ‘pure’ versus the ‘impure’, the last three chapters of Part I deal with various schemata in other modalities than the auditive. There are various properties in the acoustic signal which over a certain stretch of time can lead to the formation of schemata by principles of self-organisation (which can be seen as a kind of learning). On the other hand, there are associations formed which link musical sound to events in other modalities, such as to vision, various motor-related sensations or to more general emotional images. The questions in our context are to what extent, as well as how, the images, schemata and/or constraints in other modalities can engender, enhance and influence images of musical sound, and conversely, to what extent images of musical sound may trigger images in other modalities.

For instance, is it possible to imagine highly emotionally charged music, e.g., Schönberg’s Erwartung, without also arousing emotions, and conversely, can various emotions evoke certain images of musical sound? Does imagining certain kinds of music also engender images of certain kinds of movement, e.g., does imagining a juicy tango also evoke sensations of dance movements, or does the image of a frenetic drum sequence evoke images of equally frenetic mallet, hands, and body movements? Can images of colours be associated with certain images of musical sound? The list of such questions can be very long indeed, but from what has emerged from crossmodality research in recent years, there seems to be an increasing amount of research supporting the idea that the simultaneous presence in our minds of elements from different modalities can enhance images in many cases (as well as of course inhibit or weaken images in some cases). One very good reason for posing such questions is to try to develop systematic methods for generating and enhancing images of musical sound, in other words, to have a better understanding of what triggers images of musical sound in our minds, or what is the ‘engine’ of musical imagery.

The contribution of Mark Reybrouck (chapter 7) argues that there are many indications of motor components involved in perception and cognition, and in imagery as well, and that traditional notions of ‘passive’ sensory input coupled with abstract symbol cognition is now rejected by several neuroscientists. There is a close functional resemblance between perception and action on the one hand, and imagery of the same perceptions and actions on the other hand.

A similarly close relationship between emotional schemata in the imagery of music and speech is suggested in the contribution of Dalia Cohen and Edna Inbar (chapter 8). We may assume that for most people in our culture, images of emotions are integral to much of the music we experience. An exploration of emotional images and schemata could then be useful in further explorations of the nature of musical imagery, in particular as possible agents for the recall and enhancement of musical images.

At the end of this first part of the book, the contribution of Kostas Giannakis and Matt Smith (chapter 9) explores the link between colour and images of musical sound. The idea is that there could be a correlation here, not only for people who claim to have had synaesthetic experiences. A correlation between colour and images of musical sound can be exploited in evoking images of musical sound in the mind, as well as be useful in machine representations of musical sound.

In summary, the first part of this book is a spreading out of the topic of musical imagery, progressively exposing several aspects. Is it possible then to have a coherent, or even unitary perspective of what musical imagery is supposed to be? Probably yes, if we by musical imagery understand images of musical sound in our mind. Yet, if we think that this is too loose and all-embracing, the problem is not musical imagery, but rather music as a phenomenon. If we accept that music is infinitely complex and diversified, there is really no reason to think that our images of musical sound should be less complex and diversified.

1

Perspectives and Challenges of Musical Imagery

Albrecht Schneider and Rolf Inge Godøy

Introduction

The study of musical imagery as well as imagery in other domains is not a recent invention. Although the so called ‘cognitive revolution’ of the last quarter of the twentieth century has given the study of imagery the status of scientific investigation, we believe it is important to be aware of some historical elements here. There is sometimes an embarrassing lack of historical knowledge in contemporary cognitive science, sometimes giving us a feeling of witnessing a ‘reinvention of the wheel’. But in a more positive sense, we believe several of the questions posed today have actually been given much attention as well as creative answers in the past. Because of this, we shall in this chapter give a brief, and necessarily selective, survey of some main points in the history of musical imagery and imagery in general. To complete this overview, we shall also at the end of this chapter try...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part I Theoretical Perspectives
• Part II Performance and Composition
• Name Index
• Subject Index