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

software objects can now evolve and move around at just as fast a pace. (Bown,
Eldridge, & McCormack, 2009, p. 192)
The new interactions discussed by Bown, Eldridge, and McCormack (2009) suggested
that digital musical instruments can affect musical thought. It has been
argued that these new instruments actually scaffold musical cognition, and therefore
they extend the musical mind (Magnusson, 2009). According to Magnusson,
traditional acoustic instruments have been created in bricoleur fashion by exploring
combinations of existing materials, and learning to play such an instrument
involves exploring its affordances. “The physics of wood, strings and vibrating
membranes were there to be explored and not invented” (p. 174). In contrast, the
software of digital musical instruments permits many aspects of musical cognition
to be extended into the instrument itself. Digital musical instruments,
typically contain automation of musical patterns (whether blind or intelligent) that
allow the performer to delegate musical actions to the instrument itself, such as
playing arpeggios, generating rhythms, expressing spatial dimensions as scales (as
opposed to pitches), and so on. (Magnusson, 2009, p. 168)
The embodied approach is not limited to the study of digital musical instruments.
Actions are required to play traditional musical instruments, and such actions
have been investigated. For instance, researchers have examined the fingering
choices made by pianists as they sight read (Sloboda et al., 1998) and developed
ergonomic models of piano fingering (Parncutt et al., 1997). Bowing and fingering
movements for string instruments have also been the subject of numerous investigations
(Baader, Kazennikov, & Wiesendanger, 2005; Kazennikov & Wiesendange
r, 2009; Konczak, van der Velden, & Jaeger, 2009; Maestre et al., 2010; Rasamima
nana & Bevilacqua, 2008; Turner-Stokes & Reid, 1999). This research has included
the development of the MusicJacket, a worn device that analyzes the movement of
a violin player and provides vibrotactile feedback to teach proper bowing (van der
Linden et al., 2011). The relationship between alternative flute fingerings and their
effect on produced tones have also been examined (Botros, Smith, & Wolfe, 2006;
Verfaille, Depalle, & Wanderley, 2010).
The embodied approach is also actively exploring the possibility that gestural or
other kinds of interactions can be used to retrieve digitized music (Casey et al., 2008;
Leman, 2008). Personal music collections are becoming vast, and traditional methods
of discovering music (i.e., record stores and radio stations) are being replaced
by social networking sites and the World Wide Web. As a result, there is a growing
need for these large digital collections of music to be searchable. However, the most
common approach for cataloguing and searching these collections is to use textual
metadata that provides an indirect description of the stored music, such as the name
of the composer, the title of the song, or the genre of the music (Leman, 2008).
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