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

in the nineteenth century (Hanslick, 1957). Music critic Eduard Hanslick (1957)
opposed the view that music was representative and that its purpose was to communicate
content or affect. For Hanslick, a scientific aesthetics of music was made
impossible by sentimental appeals to emotion: “The greatest obstacle to a scientific
development of musical aesthetics has been the undue prominence given to the
action of music on our feelings” (p. 89).
As noted previously, Hanslick (1957, p. 48) argued instead that “the essence
of music is sound and motion.” The modern embodied approach to music echoes
and amplifies this perspective. Johnson (2007) agreed with Hanslick that music
is not typically representative or intentional. Instead, Johnson argued that the
dynamic nature of music—its motion, in Hanslick’s sense—presents “the flow of
human experience, feeling, and thinking in concrete, embodied forms” (p. 236).
The motion of music is not communicative, it is causal. “To hear the music is just
to be moved and to feel in the precise way that is defined by the patterns of the
musical motion” (p. 239). The motion intrinsic to the structure of music is motion
that we directly and bodily experience when it is presented to us. Johnson argues
that this is why metaphors involving motion are so central to our conceptualization
of music.
“Many people try to get into direct contact with music. Why do they do so?
Why do people make great efforts to attend a concert? Why do they invest so much
time in learning to play a musical instrument” (Leman, 2008, p. 3). If the meaning
of music is the felt movement that it causes, then the need for direct experience
of music is completely understandable. This is also reflected in an abandonment
of the conduit metaphor. The embodied view of music does not accept the notion
that music is a conduit for the transmission of propositional or affective contents.
Indeed, it hypothesizes that the rational assessment of music might interfere with
how it should best be experienced.
Activities such as reasoning, interpretation, and evaluation may disturb the feeling
of being directly involved because the mind gets involved in a representation of the
state of the environment, which distracts the focus and, as a result, may break the
‘magic spell’ of being entrained. (Leman, 2008, p. 5)
Clearly embodied researchers have a very different view of music than do classical
or connectionist researchers. This in turn leads to very different kinds of research
on musical cognition than the examples that have been introduced earlier in this
chapter.
To begin, let us consider the implication of the view that listeners should be
directly involved with music (Leman, 2008). From this view, it follows that the full
appreciation of music requires far more than the cognitive interpretation of auditory
stimulation. “It is a matter of corporeal immersion in sound energy, which is
a direct way of feeling musical reality. It is less concerned with cognitive reflection,
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