SLIDE 1
Ian Cross Centre for Music & Science Faculty of Music, Cambridge
www.mus.cam.ac.uk/~cross Paper presented to the Philological Society QMUL 9 November 2012
SLIDE 2 For most of the C20th, much writing and thinking about music was based on the premises that music existed as musical works and that these works are autonomous structures of sound with a meaning that is ‘purely musical’ and is valued ‘for-its-own-sake’. These views are still current in certain sub-fields of musicology (particularly musical aesthetics), but have come under increasing pressure from within and
- utwith musicology:
- through the realisation that the concept of the "musical work" is itself a
culturally particular—historically fairly recent—lens through which to view music
- through an acceptance of forms of music other than those of the "classical
canon"—popular musics, non-western musics—as requiring exploration and understanding
- through an increased focus on music's meanings and significances as being
bound to the contexts—social, historical—within which music occurs;
- through an increasing awareness of music as more than just sound: in
Merriam's (1963, p211-2) terms, "music cannot exist unless there is human behavior, for music is but a product of that behavior… the sound we produce, which comes through behavior, which in turn is shaped by concept, is judged both by the individual and by other members of his society in terms of its success in meeting musical criteria according to the principles accepted by that society"—music as sound, behavior and concept
SLIDE 3 Nevertheless, the notion of "music as sound" has conditioned views of music within the study of music cognition and has shaped how the field addresses music as an object of scientific study. Music cognition research as research into music as auditory object: Results of a search of the ScienceDirect database on 22 September 2010 in the categories Psychology and Neuroscience: Hence in ScienceDirect, of the >2,400 papers that are concerned with music in the psychological or neuroscientific literature, -≈90% appear to address engagement with music in terms of listening Many of these studies are shaped by models related to theories of linguistic structure (e.g., Winograd, 1968; Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983), pattern perception (e.g., Narmour, 1989, 1992), and statistical processing (e.g., Eerola et al, 2001 ; Pearce & Wiggins, 2006; Rohrmeier, Rebuschat & Cross, 2011). Much of this work has produced extremely illuminating results, but addresses only one facet
- f what has come to be recognised as music
SLIDE 4
If ca. 90% of research in the cognitive sciences of music addresses music as sound, at least 10%—in fact, to be fair, probably considerably more—deals with music as overt behaviour—as action, often in the domain of music performance The counterposition of listening and performance seems natural in conceiving of music (usually in the triad composition, performance, listening) But research in ethnomusicology suggests that this apparently natural tripartite division of composer/performer/audience is no less shaped by historical, culture- bound conceptions than is the notion of the musical work—a huge number of examples from the ethnomusicological literature shows that music is as often performed by and for the participants as it is for any audience Such manifestations of music require a fundamental rethink of the frameworks within which they can be conceptualised and explored
SLIDE 5
Alan Lomax, in his Cantometrics project (1968), provided an early and at the time unique attempt to characterise music—in his case, purely vocal music—as behaviour across cultures. Lomax's project was unique in trying to address music as something other than a social construct with features intrinsically bound to its culture of origin; he approached music as a generic human capacity that varies from culture to culture but that is almost as identifiable within a given culture as language and that is, like language, susceptible to comparison across cultures on the basis of common and distinct features Lomax's classified instances of music on the basis of musical texture, timbre, melodic form, rhythm, etc., but the principal continuum that he employed to differentiate instances of musical behaviour ran from solo to "groupy"
SLIDE 6 Lomax, 1968, p22: Summary presentation of coding sheet (L-Leader, C-Chorus)
Individualized and little integrated Groupy and integrated
1
Leader/Chorus Solo L with C (little differentiation) L with C ( parts alternating) L with C (parts
Parts independent (leadership submerged in choral activity)
2
Relation of orchestra to vocal part Solo Simple accompanying relation Heterophony Orchestra has independent role
3
Relation within orchestra Solo Unison Heterophony Part independence
4
Choral musical organization Solo Unison Heterophony Polyphony
5
Choral tonal integration Solo Poor to Very good
6
Choral rhythmic organization Solo Poor to Very good
7
Orchestral musical organization Solo Unison Heterophony Polyphony, polyrhythm
8
Orchestral tonal concert Solo Poor to Good
9
Orchestral rhythmic concert Solo Poor to Good
10
Text part Wordy to Very repetitious, nonsense
11
Vocal rhythm Simple and regular meter to Irregular and free meter
12
Vocal rhythmic organization Unison to Many independent parts
13
Orchestral rhythm Simple and regular meter to Irregular and free meter
14
Orchestral rhythmic organization Unison to Many independent parts
15
Melodic shape Arched Terraced Undulating Descending
16
Melodic form Complex organization to Simple organization
17
Phrase length Very long to Very short
18
Number of phrases More than eight to One or two
19
Position of final Bottom note to Top note in scale
20
Range of melody Monotone to Two octaves and more
21
Average interval size Monotone to A fifth or more
22
Type of vocal polyphony Drone to Counterpoint
23
Embellishment Much to Little or none
24
Tempo Very slow to Very fast
25
Volume Very soft to Very loud
26
Vocal rhythm Completely free to Strict tempo
27
Orchestral rhythm Completely free to Strict tempo
28
Glissando (gliding between tones) Constant voice gliding to Clearly separate tones
29
Melisma (note load) One syllable to many notes, frequent to One note per syllable
30
Tremolo (quavering attack) Much tremolo, frequent to Little or no vocal quavering
31
Glottal effect (guttural attacks and with embellishments) Heavy and constant (glottal ornamentation) to No glottal
32
Vocal register (voice placement) Very high falsetto to Very low deep-chest register
33
Vocal width and tension Very narrow, squeezed, and hard to Very wide, open, and mellow
34
Nasalization Constant and heavy nasal sound to Free of nasalization
35
Raspy Very harsh, noisy, chesty sound to Clear and limpid tone
36
Accent Many notes heavily stressed (very forceful attack frequent) to Very relaxed attack (no notes strongly stressed)
37
Consonants Precise enunciation of consonants to Most consonants slurred over and hard to hear
Lomax, 1968, p22: Summary presentation of coding sheet (L-Leader, C-Chorus)
Lomax, A. (1968). Folk song style and culture. Washington DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science.
SLIDE 7
More recently, Thomas Turino (2008) has developed a less complex but more broadly grounded account of music across cultures as either presentational, as in western concert music, or participatory, as in many traditional cultures—and also in many contemporary instances of functional music-making in western culture, such as liturgical contexts, football matches, garage bands, recreational choirs, etc. Turino proposes a range of features as likely to characterise presentational versus participatory musics
SLIDE 8 Participatory music Presentational music Short open, redundantly repeated forms Closed, scripted forms, longer forms and shorter performances
"Feathered" beginnings and endings Organized beginnings and endings Intensive [subtle] variation Extensive variation available Individual virtuosity downplayed Individual virtuosity emphasized Highly repetitive Repetition balanced with contrast Few dramatic contrasts Contrasts of many types as design Constancy of rhythm/meter/ groove Variability of rhythms/meter possible Dense textures Transparent textures/clarity emphasized; varied textures and density for contrast Piece as a collection of resources refashioned anew in each performance like the form, rules, and practiced moves of a game Piece as set item (although exceptions such as small ensemble jazz and Indian classical music exist) [Wide tunings; Loud volume; Buzzy timbres] [Narrow tunings; Wide dynamic range; Broad timbral range]
Turino, 2008, p59: attributes of participatory and presentational musics
Turino, T. (2008). Music as social life : the politics of participation. London: University of Chicago Press.
SLIDE 9
For Turino (2008, p48), "The style characteristics of participatory music create security in constancy and a cloaking of individual contributions which, in turn, create comfort for participants. These sound features have evolved dialectically in relation to the particular goals and value of inclusion. Participatory sound style actually functions to inspire people to join in, and this type of music making serves a deeper function of creating a special sense of social synchrony, bonding, and identity. Finally, in societies where participatory music is the most valued form, almost everyone will grow up taking part in music and dance and develop some competence; music and dance will be available to everyone as normal human activities."
SLIDE 10
Why should a "special sense of social synchrony, bonding and identity" be required? McLeod, 1974, p113: "…what music symbolizes is an altered state of consciousness, be it a transition from one status to another, the adoption of a ritual attitude, or the acting out of personal or social importance in the face of tensions implicit in the social structure. In all cases music is directed at areas regarded as uncertain… music tends to occur at points of conflict, uncertainty, or stress within the social fabric" What is music doing in these areas of "conflict, uncertainty, or stress within the social fabric"?
SLIDE 11
Interactive musics are generally simple in structure but have a potent role in mobilising a sense of social cohesion. Music typically exhibits temporal regularity that enables interacting individuals to anticipate the actions of, and to entrain their attention and their behaviours to, each other (Large and Jones, 1999; Clayton, Sager & Will, 2004); inter-participant entrainment in music is likely to lead to an enhanced sense of mutual affiliation. Music, across cultures, also means in ways that appear paradoxical but that may aid social cohesion. The idea that music embodies "natural", direct or unmediated meaning is found in many societies (Feld, 1981; Leman, 1992; Turino, 1999). At the same time music's meanings appear to be manifold and unresolvable (see, e.g., Qureshi, 1987); as Swain (1996, p135) puts it, "…music seems full of meaning to ordinary and often extraordinary listeners, yet no community of listeners can agree among themselves with any precision that comes close to natural language about the nature of that meaning"—an attribute that I have described elsewhere (Cross, 1999) as "floating intentionality".
SLIDE 12 This paradox—that music appears to embody unmediated, direct meaning, but what any particular instance of music may mean seems different in the experience of different individuals—can be dealt with by the realisation that the meanings elicited by music are not required to be made mutually explicit by individuals interacting in music. Each interacting individual can thus interpret musical meanings more-or-less entirely idiosyncratically without necessarily coming into conflict with the interpretations of others, a situation that seems to stands in direct opposition to that manifested in language where most speech acts require a degree of consensual referentiality between participants in order to be interactively efficacious. Music provides a minimally-conflictual framework for ostensibly communicative interaction; its seemingly direct expression of meaning, together with the affiliative qualities that derive from its temporal regularity, afford participants the sense that their experiences are in alignment even while the meanings that each is attributing to a joint musical activity may diverge widely. Making music together can thus be conceptualised not so much as an aesthetic act but more as a process of establishing and sustaining a sense of inter-relatedness between
- participants. As an interactive medium, music's proximal functions appear more
directed towards managing the relationships between participants than towards goals extrinsic to those relationships, again in apparent contrast with speech. Hence music may best be thought of as a communicative medium that is optimal for the management of situations of social uncertainty; music is, at root, an excellent means of coordinating social attitudes and behaviours, and can be viewed as complementary to and coextensive in its forms, structures and primitives with speech as an interactive medium.
SLIDE 13
This view of music as an interactive medium with a focal role in managing social uncertainty implies a different relationship to language studies than that implied by the idea of music as auditory processing of a presentational medium. Speech can also be employed to coordinate social attitudes and behaviours, through its phatic dimension (Malinowski, 1923), concerned with the mutual recognition of each other's presence by interlocutors in conversational contexts. The phatic dimension permeates conversational interaction and is better interpreted as applying to those elements of a conversation that are concerned with both establishing and maintaining its social context—with the relational dimension of the conversation—rather than with any referents or goals that are extrinsic to it, the transactional dimension (see Coupland, Coupland & Robinson, 1992). Relational aspects of verbal interactions are likely to fulfil dual functions: (i) setting up and consolidating mutual recognition amongst participants of their communicative engagement, and (ii) providing a framework that can support each participant in ensuring that their individual and (assumed) joint conversational goals are achieved.
SLIDE 14 This involves not only speech sounds but also action; as Sidnell (2009, p135) points out, there is "ample evidence that gesture, gaze, and body orientation" are all involved in (ibid., p125) the "little world of shared attention and involvement" that characterizes talk-in-interaction, and such non-verbal aspects of communicative involvement are likely to be crucially important in achieving what Laver (1975, p217) terms "…the fundamental social function of the multidimensional communicative behavior that accompanies and includes phatic communion… the detailed management of interpersonal relationships during the psychologically crucial margins of interaction". Music can be interpreted as functional in the phatic dimension. In contrast to the situation in speech, in music the phatic or relational dimension is foregrounded, the transactional dimension being minimal. Yet music—even in the form of interactive music-making—and speech seem so different that the suggestion that they may share functional characteristics requires further substantiation. In interactive music-making participants produce sound simultaneously and are likely to be producing overlearned patterns, while in speech participants take turns and are generating utterances on the fly Moreover, interlocutors can
- rganise joint action by virtue of language's powers of unambiguous reference —
speech can have an unambiguously transactional dimension—while people making music together are likely to experience a mutual sense of shared purpose, thanks to music's affiliative nature and its lack of requirement for referential consensus—the elements of its relational powers.
SLIDE 15 But much of speech is concerned not with effecting instrumental ends extrinsic to the ongoing linguistic interaction but with developing and sustaining the social relationships that constitute the framework for conversational participation—like interaction in music, the relational dimension makes up a significant aspect of speech interaction. Moreover, the ability to anticipate others' actions that is critically important to music is also central in speech, in managing the
- rganisation of conversational turn-taking (see Levinson, 2006).
Speech, like music, makes use of overlearned formulae (as in greetings), while music, like speech, can exhibit on-the-fly generativity (as in joint improvisational performance). Music, like speech, may involve turn-taking (as in "call-and- response" structures, or "lining-out"), while speech can involve simultaneity of utterance—intriguingly, in the case of Japanese aizuchi, fulfilling a phatic function (Kita and Ide, 2007). In its employment of the phatic, relational, dimension speech, like music, can motivate a mutual sense of shared purpose while interactive music, often embedded in broader ritual, can effect joint action just as does speech. Speech and music are not so distinct as interactive, communicative media as might at first appear; indeed, in many societies the clean distinction drawn in contemporary western societies between language and music is much more difficult to discern (see, e.g., Seeger, 1987).
SLIDE 16
Rather than constituting discrete domains, music and speech are perhaps better conceptualised as opposing poles on the continuum of human communicative resources in terms of function. While speech is optimal for mobilising joint action by virtue of language's powers of unambiguous reference, music is optimal for motivating shared intentionality (cf Tomasello et al., 2005) because of its provision of an explicit framework for "sharing time" and its inexplicitness in respect of meaning. In speech we articulate and mutually demonstrate understanding of truth- conditional propositions (the transactional dimension); we also manage relationships with interlocutors in speech (the relational dimension), but the inexplicitness, or lack of veracity, that Coupland & Jaworski (2003) suggest is requisite for this function can always be undermined by the potential for our utterances to be interpreted not as tokens of recognition of each other's communicative presence but as definite statements about the world that are capable of being contested.
SLIDE 17 In music, we cannot formulate or convey semantically decomposable
- propositions. But music has the advantage over language in the relational
domain in that music sets up and maintains its affiliative, relational, frame, without its affiliative qualities having to be continually re-negotiated, and manages abrogation of the affiliative or relational framework for communication by the preclusion of—or, more positively, liberation from—consensual referentiality that musical interaction entails or facilitates. So music as an interactive medium is likely to function in ways that overlap with those of speech, primarily in the phatic domain: in communicative contexts where the focus is on the establishment and maintenance of social relationships.
SLIDE 18
Question: do speech and music draw on the same set of communicative resources and mechanisms, perhaps even similar means, such as entrainment, mutual alignment of pitch structures and intensity, coordination of gaze and gesture - or are these distinct? Answer: we don't know, because no one has explored in detail the signals, cues, responses and joint actions that are likely to be part of unscripted, casual, real- time interactions in speech and in music with a view to comparing these across the different domains
SLIDE 19
We (Sarah Hawkins, Richard Ogden, Ian Cross, Rein Ove Sikveland, with David Greatrex, Hannah Leach & Satinder Gill) have recently conducted some pilot studies, and are now carrying out more fully-formed experiments, in which we aim to record and analyse real-time communicative interaction in speech and music in contexts that minimally constrain the nature of the interactions with a view to exploring commonalities and differences between interaction in speech and music. We already have some interesting preliminary findings that have enabled us to generate some hypotheses (of which much more in our later paper).
SLIDE 20
I want, however, to give a brief indication of the type of interaction that we are exploring in the musical domain: here is a short excerpt from the pilot study of an interaction between two women who are not currently engaged in musical practice and do not self-identify as musicians. Note that this excerpt of ca thirty seconds is extracted from a recorded interaction of some forty-five minutes, and represents the only unscripted, casual bout of musical interaction that occurred in the session. Moreover, as you will see in the later paper, the procedure and the recording protocol has developed from that employed in the pilot so as to provide more complete visual access for analysis, and to provide open-ended yet consistent frameworks within which participants can interact. On a first viewing of the recording of the whole forty-five minute session, it seemed that there was little musical worth analysing. On closer scrutiny, this short bout became evident, again at first seeming quite unstructured and almost random in places, with minimal evident interaction. However, it repaid analysis: I shall only discuss one aspect now, that of the extent to which the two "non- musical" participants entrained in the bout, attaining a surprising degree of fluent coordination.
SLIDE 21
This is a project at its outset. It is not alone, in that studies of interaction in speech and in music have been growing in number over the last few years. It is novel in that it aims to explore the possibility that speech and music are manifestations of the same set of human communicative resources by analysing real-time, unscripted interactions of which the dynamics have the potential to illuminate the foundations of human communicative interaction.
SLIDE 22
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