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

instruments can serve as behavioural objects to extend the musical mind (Bown,
Eldridge, & McCormack, 2009; Magnusson, 2009).
The perspectives summarized above reflect a fragmentation of how cognitive
science studies musical cognition. Different schools of cognitive science view music
in dissimilar ways, and therefore they explore alternative topics using diverse methodologies.
The purpose of this final section is to speculate on a different relationship
between cognitive science and musical cognition, one in which the distinctions
between the three different schools of thought become less important, and in which
a hybrid approach to the cognition of music becomes possible.
One approach to drawing the different approaches to musical cognition
together is to return to the analogy between cognitive science and classical music
and to attempt to see whether the analogy itself provides room for co-operation
between approaches. One of the themes of the analogy was that important differences
between Austro-German music, Romantic music, and modern music existed,
and that these differences paralleled those between the different schools of cognitive
science. However, there are also similarities between these different types of
music, and these similarities can be used to motivate commonalities between the
various cognitive sciences of musical cognition. It was earlier noted that similarities
existed between Austro-German classical music and musical Romanticism because
the latter maintained some of the structures and traditions of the former. So let us
turn instead to bridging a gap that seems much wider, the gap between Austro-
German and modern music.
The differences between Austro-German classical music and modern music
seem quite clear. The former is characterized by centralized control and formal structures;
it is a hot medium (McLuhan, 1994) that creates marked distinctions between
composer, performer, and a passive audience (Bown, Eldridge, & McCormack, 2009),
and it applies the conduit metaphor (Reddy, 1979) to view the purpose of music as
conveying content from composer to listener. In contrast, modern music seems to
invert all of these properties. It abandons centralized control and formal structures;
it is a cool medium that blurs the distinction between composer, performer, and an
active audience; and it rejects the conduit metaphor and the intentional nature of
music (Hanslick, 1957; Johnson, 2007).
Such dramatic differences between types of classical music suggest that it
would not be surprising for very different theories to be required to explain such
cognitive underpinnings. For instance, consider the task of explaining the process of
musical composition. A classical theory might suffice for an account of composing
Austro-German music, while a very different approach, such as embodied cognitive
science, may be required to explain the composition of modern music.
One reason for considering the possibility of theoretical diversity is that in
the cool medium of modern music, where control of the composition is far more
308 Chapter 6