Ressources.ircam

Music, as a temporal and sounding art, calls forth an experiential and epistemological approach to make sense of it. Three major mechanisms can be distinguished in this regard: (i) the discretisation of the sonorous ux, reducing the continuous unfolding to succes- sive assignments in a time-series; (ii) the tension between the perceptual and conceptual character of these assignments; and (iii) the challenge of providing measuring tools for describing these assignments.
In order to investigate these mechanisms, there is need of a descriptive and explanatory framework that brings together insights and methodologies from the humanities and the natural sciences. Much can be learnt from philosophical and psychological approaches to the perception and experience of time, revolving around concepts as the constituting function of time (Kant, Husserl Bergson), presentational immediacy (Whitehead), spacious present (James) and psychical present time (Stern). Other contributions stem from linguis- tics and focus on the act of mental pointing (deixis) to events that are perceived and expe- rienced (Bühler). It is an approach that conceives of an observer as a point of reference for interactions in a referential exchange by establishing a eld of pointing rather than a symbolic eld of meaning. It locates now-moments in time rather than merely tagging them and provides a description in terms of personal, spatial and temporal coordinates (I, here, now). Listeners, in this view, can be considered centres of reference that keep track with the unfolding of the music through time.
A more operational approach to sense-making is second-order cybernetics, which stresses the role of the observer as part of the observed system. It introduces the role of the subject in the process of sense-making with contributions by Varela being most fruitful in this regard. Especially his description of neurophenomenology is waiting for further elaboration. It provides a ground for bringing together the phenomenological approach to experience and its neural underpinnings, and has provided a ground for the concept of emergence of meaning, as developed in the eld of dynamic systems theory. The latter is a recent eld from systems science that conceives of the mind as a dynamic system that describes possible trajectories in state-spaces. The domain is challenging as it brings toge- ther neuroscience and the psychology of perception, but its translation to the eld of music is still mostly to be done. It is to be expected that ndings from second-order cybernetics, dynamic systems theory and neuroscience can be brought together in one more encom- passing framework to describe the mutual interrelations between brain dynamics and the dynamical unfolding of the sounding music. A lot is to be expected here from recent deve- lopments in the neurosciences, with measuring techniques that can provide continuous and detailed descriptions of music processing both in terms of neural time-series and localisa- tion of involved activated areas in the brain.