Shaping music in performance

(Daniel Leech-Wilkinson – King's College London)

Project overview | Performers' perspectives | Representations | Visualisations | Mechanisms | Recruitment for current studies | Workshops | Music and Shape conference

Music and shape: underlying mechanisms

While Helen Prior has been investigating performers' experiences of shape, and Dan Tidhar and Mats Küssner have been looking at listeners' shape-related responses to music, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has been taking a more theoretical approach, drawing on existing research in embodiment and cross-modal mapping in order to suggest perceptual mechanisms that may explain the ease with which music seems shaped.

In outline, it is suggested that changes made by performers in the loudness, speed or pitch of notes bring to performances a sense of constant change in the dynamics of the music (dynamics in the sense of changing motion and intensity), and that it is this more abstract sense of dynamic change that is felt as changing shape. In other words, shape in musical performance and response may have more to do with changing feeling-state than a sense that music happens in two- or three-dimensional space.  Daniel Stern's work on forms of vitality offers one way of thinking about the changing shape of feeling (Stern 2004, 2010) while Mark Johnson's recent work on embodiment offers a way of understanding in general terms how our awarenesses of tension, linearity and amplitude, fundamental to the dynamics of music, 'are qualities of organism-environment interactions' and derive from our experience of living and moving within our environment (Johnson, 2007).

Mechanisms which encourage the brain to map promiscuously between the dynamics of sound, feeling, and embodied knowledge (among many other phenomena) are likely to operate at a pre-conscious level on which these various perceptual domains share qualities of a sort that, precisely because they are pre-conscious, cannot be directly perceived: one perceives a likeness without being able to say why. Cross-modal perception (and its specialised variant, synaesthesia) offer examples of the consequences of the routine operation of these mechanisms. Studies by Näätänen & Winkler (1999) and McLachlan & Wilson (2010) suggest how they may work, while recent studies of multisensory perception (Stein et al., 2004; Stein & Stanford, 2008) and the implications of mirror neurons (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Molnar-Szakacs & Overy, 2006) emphasise the importance and ubiquity of cross-modal perception in general.

In this context, the widespread perception that music in performance is continually changing shape can be seen as an inevitable by-product of the way the brain responds to sensory inputs of all kinds.

Mark Johnson. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of human understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vittorio Gallese & George Lakoff. (2005). The brain's concepts: the role of the sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology 22:3, 455-479.

Istvan Molnar-Szakacs & Katie Overy. (2006). Music and mirror neurons: from motion to 'e'motion. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 1, 235–241.

Risto Näätänen & Istvan Winkler. (1999). The concept of auditory stimulus representation in cognitive neuroscience. Psychological Bulletin 125:6, 826-859.

Barry E. Stein, Wan Jiang, & Terence R. Stanford. (2004). Multisensory integration in the single neurons of the midbrain. In Gemma A. Calvert, Charles Spence and Barry E. Stein, ed., The Handbook of Multisensory Processes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 243-264.

Barry E. Stein & Terrence R. Stanford. (2008). Multisensory integration: current issues from the perspective of the single neuron. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 9, 255-266 & corrigendum.

Daniel Stern. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton.

Daniel Stern. (2010). Forms of Vitality: Exploring dynamic experience in psychology, the arts, psychotherapy, and development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.