Mark Reybrouck
"Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach"
(2012)
Music, in this view, is not merely a set of structures, but something that has inductive power and that involves mechanisms of sense-making and reactive behaviour that are grounded in our biology and our cognitive abilities (Reybrouck, 2005a, 2006a). As such, it challenges traditional approaches and paradigms which run through musicology as a discipline, with a major emphasis on historical research, music analysis and performance studies. The latter, however, have received as yet a lot of empirical support from cognitive sciences with a vast body of literature on the effects of music performance as a skilled activity that requires the simultaneous integration of multimodal sensory and motor information with multimodal sensory feedback mechanisms to monitor performance (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003). Several behavioural, neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies have explored the highly specialised sensorimotor, auditory, visual-spatial, auditory-spatial and memory skills of musicians while performing motor, auditory and somatosensory tasks.
Skilled performance, however, is not the most common way of dealing with music. It is restricted to a minor part of music users in general and can be mastered only after years of special training. It is arguable, therefore, to broaden the experiential approach and to conceive of dealing with music at a more general level of coping with the sounds. ‘Dealing with music’, then, is to be considered as a generic term that encompasses traditional musical behaviours—such as listening, performing, improvising and composing—, as well as more general ‘perceptual’ and ‘behavioural’ categories as exploring, selecting and focussing of attention on the perceptual side, and actions, interactions and transactions with the (sonic) world on the behavioural side. In order to encompass all these behaviours, it is desirable, further, not to speak of listeners, or performers—as these embrace only some of the possible ways of dealing with music—but of music users in general as a broad category of subjects that deal with music by means of one or more of these behaviours.
This paper could lend support to certain pet notions of mine, especially the idea that reception/listening may itself be(come) a "practice." But then there is this always-obligatory appeal to the Average Joe, the effort to justify such a project as a major part of something or other, whereas the study of skilled performance and special training necessarily comprises only a minor part .
