Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

fingertip to manipulate a visual interface that surrounds it, modulates a musical
process (i.e., changes the frequency and amplitude of a sine wave). Visual signals
displayed on the reacTable—and visible to all performers—indicate the properties
of the musical event produced by each object as well as the flow of signals from one
object to another.
The reacTable is an example of musical stigmergy because when multiple
performers use it simultaneously, they are reacting to the existing musical events.
These events are represented as physical locations of objects on the reacTable
itself, the visual signals emanating from these objects, and the aural events that
the reacTable is producing. By co-operatively moving, adding, or removing objects,
the musicians collectively improvise a musical performance. The reacTable is an
interface intended to provide a “combination of intimate and sensitive control, with
a more macro-structural and higher level control which is intermittently shared,
transferred and recovered between the performer(s) and the machine” (Jordà et al.,
2007, p. 145). That is, the reacTable—along with the music it produces—provides
control analogous to that provided by the nest-in-progress of an insect colony.
From the preceding discussion, we see that modern music shares many characteristics
with the embodied reaction to classical cognitive science. With its decentralization
of control, responsibility for the composition has “leaked” from the
composer's mind. Its definition also requires contributions from both the performers
and the audience, and not merely a score. This has implications for providing
accounts of musical meaning, or of the goals of musical compositions. The classical
notion of music communicating intended meanings to audiences is not easily
applied to modern music.
Classical cognitive science’s view of communication is rooted in cybernetics
(Shannon, 1948; Wiener, 1948), because classical cognitive science arose from exploring
key cybernetic ideas in a cognitivist context (Conrad, 1964b; Leibovic, 1969;
Lindsay & Norman, 1972; MacKay, 1969; Selfridge, 1956; Singh, 1966). As a result,
the cybernetic notion of communication—transfer of information from one location
to another—is easily found in the classical approach.
The classical notion of communication is dominated by the conduit metaphor
(Reddy, 1979). According to the conduit metaphor, language provides containers
(e.g., sentences, words) that are packed with meanings and delivered to receivers,
who unpack them to receive the intended message. Reddy provides a large number
of examples of the conduit metaphor, including: “You still haven’t given me any idea
of what you mean”; “You have to put each concept into words very carefully”; and
“The sentence was filled with emotion.”
The conduit metaphor also applies to the traditional view of classical music,
which construes this music as a “hot medium” to which the listener contributes little
(McLuhan, 1994): the composer places some intended meaning into a score, the
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