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

The embodied approach is interested in the possibility of using more direct
aspects of music to guide such retrieval (Leman, 2008). Is it possible to access music
on the basis of one’s personal experience of music? Leman hypothesizes that human
action can serve as the basis of a corporeal-based querying system for retrieving
music. His idea is to use the body to convert a musical idea (e.g., a desire to retrieve
a particular type of music) into musical physical energy that can be mapped onto
the profiles of digitized music, permitting content-based retrieval. For instance, one
could query a musical database by singing or playing a melody (De Mulder et al.,
2006), by manipulating a spatial representation that maps the similarity of stored
music (Cooper et al., 2006; Pampalk, Dixon, & Widmer, 2004), or even by making
gestures (Ko & Byun, 2002).
Compared to the other two approaches described in this chapter, the embodied
approach to musical cognition is fairly new, and it is not as established. “The
hypothesis that musical communication is based on the encoding, transmission,
and decoding of intended actions is, I believe, an attractive one. However, at this
moment it is more a working hypothesis than an established fact” (Leman, 2008,
p. 237). This “working hypothesis,” though, has launched an interesting literature on
the study of the relationship between music and action that is easily distinguished
from the classical and connectionist research on musical cognition.
6.7 Cognitive Science and Classical Music
In the preceding sections of this chapter we have explored the analogy that cognitive
science is like classical music. This analogy was developed by comparing the characteristics
of three different types of classical music to the three different schools
of cognitive science: Austro-German classical music to classical cognitive science,
musical Romanticism to connectionist cognitive science, and modern music to
embodied cognitive science.
We also briefly reviewed how each of the three different schools has studied
topics in the cognition of music. One purpose of this review was to show that
each school of cognitive science has already made important contributions to this
research domain. Another purpose was to show that the topics in musical cognition
studied by each school reflected different, tacit views of the nature of music.
For instance, the emphasis on formalism in traditional classical music is reflected
in classical cognitive science’s attempt to create generative grammars of musical
structure (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983). Musical romanticism’s affection for the
sublime is reflected in connectionist cognitive science’s use of unsupervised networks
to capture regularities that cannot be formalized (Bharucha, 1999). Modern
music’s rejection of the classic distinctions between composer, performer, and audience
is reflected in embodied cognitive science’s exploration of how digital musical
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