Music and Embodied Cognition

Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking

Arnie Cox

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780253021670
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Taking a cognitive approach to musical meaning, Arnie Cox explores embodied experiences of hearing music as those that move us both consciously and unconsciously. In this pioneering study that draws on neuroscience and music theory, phenomenology and cognitive science, Cox advances his theory of the "mimetic hypothesis, " the notion that a large part of our experience and understanding of music involves an embodied imitation in the listener of bodily motions and exertions that are involved in producing music. Through an often unconscious imitation of action and sound, we feel the music as it moves and grows. With applications to tonal and post-tonal Western classical music, to Western vernacular music, and to non-Western music, Cox's work stands to expand the range of phenomena that can be explained by the role of sensory, motor, and affective aspects of human experience and cognition.

PART ONE

Theoretical Background

1 Mimetic Comprehension

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery—
it’s the sincerest form of learning.

George Bernard Shaw

When people are free to do as they please,
they usually imitate each other.

Eric Hoffer

If music cognition is embodied in a musically meaningful way, in the flesh of experience, then we ought to be able to specify just how this occurs. One way begins in imitation of musical sounds and of the physical exertions that produce them. This bodily comprehension of sounds and of sound-producing actions is one of the bases of embodied cognition of music, and it is the central basis that we will be exploring in the following chapters.

The issue of musical embodiment may be relatively straightforward in the case of performers, in the sense that performing, planning, and otherwise thinking about musical performance are tied to the bodily actions of performance. But the situation is less straightforward in the case of listeners: How and why would listening to or thinking about music, apart from planning or recalling one’s own performance, have anything to do with embodiment beyond the operations of the auditory system? The answer offered here is that listening to, recalling, or otherwise thinking about music involves one or more kinds of vicarious performance, or imitation (or simulation), and that the role of this imitation in music is a special case of its general role in human perception. The gist of this idea is not new, but the details of how it actually plays out in music comprehension will take some time to describe.

By imitation I mean not only the overt behavior of “monkey see, monkey do” but also covert imitation that occurs only in imagination. These forms of imitation occur whenever we attend to the behavior of others, whether in the performing arts or athletics, or in learning a particular skill from someone else’s demonstration, or in merely taking an interest in what others are doing. When we imitate overtly or covertly, in effect we are responding to two implicit questions: What’s it like to do that? and its twin question, What’s it like to be that? We answer these questions in part by overtly and covertly imitating the behavior of others.

Overt imitation is plainly evident in children but it is also evident later in life. Music lessons and foreign language classes, for example, involve a measure of deliberate overt imitation. But imitation also regularly occurs covertly, involuntarily, and without our awareness, and I will try to clarify the importance of this. Because the term “imitation” bears unhelpful connotations, such as a lack of originality and/or lack of sophistication, I will in most cases describe imitative behavior as mimetic.¹ By behavior I mean not only overt actions, as in singing along with music, but also the behavior of muscle-related portions of the brain. Since overt mimetic behavior is plainly evident, it will not require much investigation in this context. The covert processes, however, some of which are conscious and some of which are not, will require more attention.

I will refer to overt mimetic behavior as mimetic motor action (MMA), and for the relevant muscle-related brain processes that do not manifest in overt actions I will use the term mimetic motor imagery (MMI): mimetic for imitative, motor for muscle related, and imagery for “thought,” “imagination,” or “mental representation.” I intend imagery to include not only voluntary and conscious forms, but especially those forms that occur automatically and with or without our awareness. The involuntary and nonconscious forms of MMI are in some respects the most significant in the construction of musical meaning.²

It is important to distinguish imagination, as the term is commonly used, from imagery. When I imagine playing the cello, for example, this is normally a conscious and deliberate enactment of motor imagery, and when I imagine playing the cello like Jacqueline du Pré, this is conscious and deliberate MMI and is thus a special case of MMI generally. MMI is grounded in motor-related brain processes that occasionally become conscious and occasionally are initiated deliberately.

As a whole, the various forms of mimetic behavior (MMA and MMI) constitute the core of the mimetic hypothesis (Cox 2001, 2011), whose initial principles are the following:

• Part of how we comprehend the behavior of others is by imitating, covertly (MMI) or overtly (MMA), the observed actions of others.

• Part of how we comprehend music is by imitating, covertly or overtly, the observed sound-producing actions of performers.

Both of these propositions lead immediately to many questions. In the case of mu­sic these include the questions of how this might apply to, say, electronic music, in which the sounds are not produced directly by human exertions, or to ensemble music, where the various performers may be doing quite different things—for example, do listeners somehow imitate the percussion, the winds, and the strings of an orchestra all at once? They also raise the question of how differences in performing experience shape the different experiences of individual listeners. For example, listening to violin or fiddle music will offer a different mimetic experience for string players than it will for other listeners, and the same applies to every performance medium. A theory of embodied music cognition must accommodate such variables, and I address these and other questions in the next chapter, where I describe twenty principles of the mimetic hypothesis. The value of the hypothesis and its implications, however, depends on the evidence for the hypothesis in the broader context of general mimetic behavior, and that is the purpose of the present chapter.

Because it will be a few pages before I get to the details of the hypothesis, I offer a preview of its principles here. The first nine apply to mimetic comprehension generally, while the others are more germane to music, and for the most part all are listed in order from more general to more specific. While each principle is integral to the hypothesis, principles 6–7, 9–13, and 16–20 are among the most significant for the approach to musical experience and embodied cognition described in subsequent chapters.

1. Sounds are produced by physical events; sounds indicate (signify) the physicality of their source

2. Many or most musical sounds are evidence of the human motor actions that produce them

3. Humans understand other entities (animate or not, human or not) and events in their environment in part via mimetic behavior (MMI and MMA)

4. MMA and MMI are bodily representations of observed actions

5. Mimetic comprehension is based on visual, auditory, and/or tactile information:

• The observed behavior can be seen but not heard (the sight of action)

• The observed behavior can be heard but not seen (the sound of action)

• The observed behavior need not be seen or heard (the feel of action)

6. Musical imagery is partly motor imagery

7. Mimetic behavior (MMI and MMA) involves the variables of volition, consciousness, and overtness:

• Mimetic behavior can be voluntary, but often it is involuntary

• It can be conscious, but often it is nonconscious (beyond awareness)

• It can be overt, but often it is covert (occurring only in imagery)

8. MMI and MMA are more strongly activated in observation of goal-directed actions

9. MMI and MMA occur in real time, recall, and planning

10. MMI and MMA take three forms:

• Intramodal, or direct-matching (e.g., finger imitation of finger movements)

• Intermodal, or cross-modal (e.g., subvocal imitation of musical sounds generally)

• Amodal (abdominal exertions that underlie limb movements and vocalizations)

11. Any and all acoustic features can or will be mimetically represented: pitch, duration, timbre, strength (acoustic intensity, or “volume”), and location

12. Different kinds of music “invite” (motivate) different kinds of mimetic engagement, and this contributes to the different feel (quale) of different kinds of music

13. Music is sometimes found to “resist” mimetic participation

14. Ensemble music offers simultaneous multiple “invitations”

15. MMI and MMA can be stronger in live performance than in recorded performance

16. MMI and MMA vary in strength and accuracy among different people

17. Mimetic participation results in a sense of belonging and shared achievement

18. Mimetic participation is a central source of musical affect

19. MMI and MMA motivate and constrain conceptualization (metaphoric and otherwise)

20. Mimetic comprehension is part of human cognition generally

I am referring to this as a hypothesis because most of the principles are empirically testable but for the most part have yet to be tested directly in musical contexts. Nevertheless, the evidence presented below leaves little question that music is comprehended mimetically, and instead it leaves only the more specific questions of (1) the extent to which this is so, (2) the manner in which it plays out in different contexts, and (3) its implications for musical meaning.

Readers who happen to be familiar with theories of entrainment and/or simulation (e.g., Barsalou 1999 and 2009; Jeannerod 2001) will find overlap with the mimetic hypothesis. The much discussed “mirror neurons” (e.g., Iacoboni 2008) are also relevant, although we will consider some of the complexities that arise in trying to specify their likely role. Within music scholarship, the mimetic hypothesis is similar to ideas in Lidov (1987), Todd (1995), Cumming (1997 and 2000), Mead (1999), Leman (2008), and numerous others.³ Of particular note are two ideas in Cusick (2006). The first is her description of a listener’s desire to be the music, which is also one of the implications of the hypothesis and one that will force us eventually to define the music in light of mimetic engagement. The other is the notion of responding to an invitation to participate, which for all intents and purposes is identical to principle 12.⁴

What distinguishes the mimetic hypothesis from related writings is the more comprehensive view of imitation in music perception and of its role in our affective-cognitive responses to music. I begin by considering some of the evidence for the hypothesis.

Evidence for the Mimetic Hypothesis

The majority of the evidence comes from areas outside of music, in the form of psychological studies of overt mimetic behavior (MMA, mimetic motor action) and neurological studies of covert mimetic behavior (MMI, mimetic motor imagery). In order to keep the focus on music, I have selected studies that are most closely related to music comprehension. I have grouped the evidence into the following overlapping categories:

1. Psychological Studies of Imitation

1.1. Child-Caregiver Interactions

1.2. Social Interactions in Adulthood

2. Neurological Studies of MMI and MMA in General

3. MMI and Auditory Perception: Neurological and Psychological Studies

3.1. Speech

3.2. Vocal and Instrumental Music

Discussion of the hypothesis requires a couple of novel terms. Mimetic comprehension refers to the portion of music comprehension that involves MMA and MMI. Mimetic participation emphasizes the joining-in and taking-part that result from MMI and MMA. Mimetic engagement refers to the more general aspect of merely being engaged with the music as a listener, and one of the claims to be explored is that whenever we are engaged in listening, normally we are mimetically engaged whether we are aware of it or not.

Although mimetic perception might be an apt term, I will speak most often of mimetic comprehension because the familiar use of “perception” is largely if not entirely nonmimetic (that is, not involving the mimetic processes that I am describing here). Once the arguments of the following chapters have been made, mimetic perception can then be understood as a form of perception that is complementary to our more traditional understanding of music perception. Along these lines, I am taking cognition to be the sum of the processes of coming-to-know and coming-to-understand and to thus subsume all forms of perception, comprehension, and conceptualization.

Finally, it will be helpful on occasion to use the term mimetic representation. This is defined in the discussion of principle 4 in the next chapter, but for now we can think of mimetic representations as activity in the muscles (MMA) and/or the motor-related portions of the brain (MMI) that involve imitation as a direct response to music—for example, singing along with a melody or dancing to a song are two kinds of mimetic representations of music. A mimetic representation is thus a kind of copy that we make, or that we embody, as part of how we perceive and comprehend something exterior to us.

1.1. Psychological Studies of Imitation: Children and Caregivers

Human development is saturated with overt imitation, where “monkey see mon­key do” describes a significant portion of our social lives as children. I want to suggest, in a manner similar to Walton’s discussion of the practice of make-believe (Walton 1990), that the overt imitation we practice as children (MMA) remains a part of how we participate with and understand others in the world, and that rather than outgrowing imitation as adults, a greater proportion of imitation gradually takes the form of MMI. The development of mimetic motor imagery occurs in tandem with the development of nonmimetic motor imagery (imagined actions that are not directly imitative of an observed action), and together the two constitute the more general category of motor imagery: imagination of one’s own actions, including planned, recalled, and otherwise imagined singing and playing instruments. With this in mind, let us examine the nature and breadth of imitation in our early lives, first in general and then in musical contexts.

General Imitative Behavior

Infant studies confirm what might seem rather unremarkable: as infants, we imitate the vocalizations, facial expressions, and gestures of others around us.⁵ These studies make plain the pervasive and fundamental role of imitation in how we learn to take part in and make sense of the world from the very start.⁶ There is one significant feature of infant-caregiver interactions, however, that may not be obvious at first, and it is the mutuality of imitation in these situations: not only do infants imitate parents and other caregivers, but parents and other caregivers likewise imitate infants (Malloch 1999–2000). As Ulric Neisser puts it, “What is perceived is not merely the other’s behavior, but its reciprocity with one’s own. Both participants are engaged in a mutual enterprise, and they are aware of that mutuality” (Neisser 1976, 10). While it might not be surprising that we should imitate others as part of the process of learning to be fully human, we should ask why adult caregivers would imitate an infant. One answer is that, for infants, a caregiver’s imitative behavior demonstrates at least two things: that as infants we are capable of generating a like re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Theoretical Background
• Part 2: Spatial Conceptions
• Part 3: Beyond Musical Space
• Appendix I. Mimetic Subvocalization and Absolute Pitch
• Appendix II. Levels of Abstraction among Metaphors
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index