Known today mostly as an author of Romantic short stories and fairy tales for children, Prince Vladimir Odoyevskiy was a distinguished thinker of his time, philosopher and bibliophile. The scope of his interests includes also history of magic arts and alchemy, German Romanticism, Church music. An attempt to understand the peculiarity of eight specific modes used in chants of Russian Orthodox Church led him to his own musical theory based upon well-known writings by Zarlino, Leibniz, Euler, Prony. He realized (...) his theoretical ideas in an enharmonical piano with nineteen notes for every octave. His call for a different musical scale remained largely ignored in the nineteenth century, until the topic was raised anew by twentieth-century composers and musicians. (shrink)

This essay explores the benefits of utilizing non-scientific examples and analogies in teaching philosophy of science courses. These examples can help resolve two basic difficulties faced by most instructors, especially when teaching lower-level courses: first, they can prompt students to take an active interest in the class material, since the examples will involve aspects of the culture well-known, or at least more interesting, to the students; and second, these familiar, less-threatening examples will lessen the students' collective anxieties and open them (...) up to learning the material more easily. To demonstrate this strategy of constructing and employing non-scientific examples, a lengthy analogy between musical styles and Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions is developed. (shrink)

“Music is a loftier Revelation than all Wisdom and all Philosophy .” BEETHOVEN.

Professor Michael Edgeworth McIntyre is an eminent scientist who has also had a part-time career as a musician. From a lifetime's thinking, he offers this extraordinary synthesis exposing the deepest connections between science, music, and mathematics, while avoiding equations and technical jargon. He begins with perception psychology and the dichotomization instinct and then takes us through biological evolution, human language, and acausality illusions all the way to the climate crisis and the weaponization of the social media, and beyond that (...) into the deepest parts of theoretical physics - demonstrating our unconscious mathematical abilities. He also has an important message of hope for the future. Contrary to popular belief, biological evolution has given us not only the nastiest, but also the most compassionate and cooperative parts of human nature. This insight comes from recognizing that biological evolution is more than a simple competition between selfish genes. Rather, he suggests, in some ways it is more like turbulent fluid flow, a complex process spanning a vast range of timescales. Professor McIntyre is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (FRS) and has worked on problems as diverse as the Sun's magnetic interior, the Antarctic ozone hole, jet streams in the atmosphere, and the psychophysics of violin sound. He has long been interested in how different branches of science can better communicate with each other and with the public, harnessing aspects of neuroscience and psychology that point toward the deep 'lucidity principles' that underlie skilful communication. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary spring school “Language, music, and cognition: Organizing events in time” was held from February 26 to March 2, 2018 at the Institute of Musicology of the University of Cologne. Language, speech, and music as events in time were explored from different perspectives including evolutionary biology, social cognition, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience of speech, language, and communication, as well as computational and biological approaches to language and music. There were 10 lectures, 4 workshops, and 1 student (...) poster session. Overall, the spring school investigated language and music as neurocognitive systems and focused on a mechanistic approach exploring the neural substrates underlying musical, linguistic, social, and emotional processes and behaviors. In particular, researchers approached questions concerning cognitive processes, computational procedures, and neural mechanisms underlying the temporal organization of language and music, mainly from two perspectives: one was concerned with syntax or structural representations of language and music as neurocognitive systems (i.e., an intrapersonal perspective), while the other emphasized social interaction and emotions in their communicative function (i.e., an interpersonal perspective). The spring school not only acted as a platform for knowledge transfer and exchange but also generated a number of important research questions as challenges for future investigations. (shrink)

It has always been controversial to make a sharp distinction between the philosophical and the psychological approaches to aesthetics; and the revolution brought about by cognitive science has led many to believe that the philosophy of art no longer controls a sovereign territory of its own. To take one case in point: recent aesthetics has addressed the problem of fiction, asking how it is that real emotions can be felt towards merely imagined events. Several philosophers have tried to solve this (...) problem by leaning on observations in psychology – Jenefer Robinson, for example, exploring the domain of pre-conscious and non-rational responses, and Greg Currie, invoking simulation theory from the realm of cognitive science. I am not yet persuaded that either has succeeded in solving the philosophical question: but the fact that such sophisticated and well-informed philosophers should begin from studies in empirical psychology says much about how the subject of aesthetics has changed since the early days of linguistic analysis. (shrink)

Odour-sound correspondences provide some of the most fascinating and intriguing examples of crossmodal associations, in part, because it is unclear from where exactly they originate. Although frequently used as similes, or figures of speech, in both literature and poetry, such smell-sound correspondences have recently started to attract the attention of experimental researchers too. To date, the findings clearly demonstrate that the majority of non-synaesthetic individuals associate orthonasally-presented odours with various different sound properties, e.g., pitch, instrument type, and timbre, in a (...) non-random manner. What is more, these auditory-olfactory associations exhibit a number of features that are common to other crossmodal associations, such as their consistency over time, and their bidirectionality. However, the psychological mechanism underpinning these associations in the general population remain unclear, with a number of distinct hypotheses having been put forward over the years. In this chapter, we consider auditory-olfactory associations in art and science, focusing on poetry, music composition, and performance. First, we provide examples of the use of auditory-olfactory synaesthetic metaphors in poetry, from William Shakespeare through to Romanticism, illustrating how crossmodal associations have appeared in literature for centuries. Then, we move on to focus on music composition and performance, describing a number of examples where auditory stimuli have been purposely matched with crossmodally corresponding olfactory and/or visual stimuli. Considering the scientific study of smell-sound correspondences, we review the key psychophysical studies demonstrating that, beyond the artistic context, robust and non-random crossmodal associations are also triggered in the majority of the general population. We discuss a number of hypotheses that have been put forward over the years to account for such associations, focusing on the idea that certain correspondences between olfactory and auditory stimuli are mediated by the emotional character of the component stimuli. (shrink)

Music is a universal human activity. Its evolution and its value as a cognitive resource are starting to come into focus. This chapter endeavors to give readers a clearer sense of the adaptive aspects of music, as well as the underlying cognitive and neural structures. Special attention is given to the important emotional dimensions of music, and an evolutionary argument is made for thinking of music as a prelinguistic embodied form of cognition—a form that is still (...) available to us as contemporary music creators and consumers. (shrink)

Douglas Wadle celebrates the juxtaposition of art and science while examining music's influence on humanity's understanding of our place in the universe. Tracing the millennia-old love affair between music and science, Wadle chronicles the surprising ubiquity of musical training among history's greatest thinkers. He shines a spotlight on the intertwining stories of pattern and form and how they complement one another in our search for creativity and insight. Einstein's Violin relies on extensive research to tell the story of (...) how music impacts the pattern recognition software in our brains, facilitating more creative problem solving. Without digression into technical treatise, it focuses on the historical stories that best display music's beautiful interaction with mind and universe"--Back cover. (shrink)

The dissertation discusses the relationship between two approaches to researching music: the empirical approach of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and the speculative approach of philosophical aesthetics of music. The aim of the dissertation is to determine the relationship between problems, conceptual frameworks, and domains of inquiry of the two approaches. The dissertation should answer whether the philosophical and the empirical approach deal with the same, or at least relatable aspects of music. In particular, it should answer (...) whether the results of the empirical research contribute to the debates of philosophical aesthetics of music. Each of the three chapters of the dissertation deals with one particular problem in philosophy of music: meaning in music, value of music, and the relationship between music and the emotions. For each particular philosophical problem discussed in these chapters, it is demonstrated that the experimental results provide interesting insights for philosophy of music. It is concluded in the dissertation that philosophers can benefit from examining experimental studies, not only regarding the particular aesthetic theories, but also in regard to the methodological consideration, since the dissertation shows that this kind of interdisciplinary approach uncovers methods useful to philosophers, not commonly available to the armchair philosophical approach. (shrink)

Music can be described as sequences of events that are structured in pitch and time. Studying music processing provides insight into how complex event sequences are learned, perceived, and represented by the brain. Given the temporal nature of sound, expectations, structural integration, and cognitive sequencing are central in music perception (i.e., which sounds are most likely to come next and at what moment should they occur?). This paper focuses on similarities in music and language cognition research, (...) showing that music cognition research provides insight into the understanding of not only music processing but also language processing and the processing of other structured stimuli. The hypothesis of shared resources between music and language processing and of domain-general dynamic attention has motivated the development of research to test music as a means to stimulate sensory, cognitive, and motor processes. (shrink)

Critical writing about music and music history in nineteenth-century Britain was permeated with metaphor and analogy. Music and Metaphor examines how over-arching theories of music history were affected by reference to various figurative linguistic templates adopted from other disciplines such as art, religion, politics and science.

Music and affects share a long history. In recent times, 4E cognitive sciences (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended), situated affectivity, and related ecological theoretical frameworks have been conceptualizing music as a case of a tool for feeling. Drawing on this debate, I propose to further theorize the role of music in situating our affectivity by analyzing how the very affective affordances of music are technologically situated. In other words, I propose to shift the attention from (...) class='Hi'>music as a tool for feeling to the tools for feeling music. I argue that the experience of music as a tool for feeling may be altered, enhanced, or lessened depending on the tools for feeling music. I investigate the extent to which AI might be a case of a tool for feeling music and examine the influence it could exert over musical affectivity. I conclude that AI can be considered a tool for feeling music of curatorial type and that the limitations and/or biases of AI as a method risk lessening the power of musical affective affordances. (shrink)

Tom McLeish’s Music and Poetry of Science adds to along and complex literature looking at the creative powers of human genius. In addition to his own scientific field, McLeish draws on art, poetry, novels, music, and BBC television productions. Although positioned in the line of the ‘two cultures’ debate typically associated with C. P. Snow, McLeish reprises William Beveridge’s earlier contribution to that tradition, perhaps, to be aligned,although this McLeish does not do, with Peter Pesic’s Music and (...) the Making of Modern Science . The task of coordinating music, poetry, and science requires more, such that the material hermeneutics of the late Irish-Belgian physicist and philosopher, Patrick Heelan might have offered a basis for fruitful dialogue, although this,too, was a missed opportunity. Given McLeish’s illustration of the beauty key to mathematics in physics via BBC television, it seems an illustration of technological millenarianism via Andrew MacKendrick’s 1951 film, The Man in the White Sui , updated for today, key in a nano-context, might be helpful in raising issues of material‘instability,’ i.e., environmental detritus, nano-waste and pollution. (shrink)

This book analyzes the relationships that exist between esotericism and music from Antiquity to the 20th century, investigating ways in which magic, astrology, alchemy, divination, and cabbala interact with music. Ce livre offre un panorama des relations entre l sot risme et la musique de l Antiquit au 20 me si cle et montre comment la magie, l astrologie, l alchimie, la divination et la cabale interagissent avec l art et la science des sons.

Articulates an imaginationist solution to the question of how purely instrumental music can be perceived by a listener as having emotional content. Both musicians and laypersons can perceive purely instrumental music without words or an associated story or program as expressing emotions such as happiness and sadness. But how? In this book, Saam Trivedi discusses and critiques the leading philosophical approaches to this question, including formalism, metaphorism, expression theories, arousalism, resemblance theories, and persona theories. Finding these to be (...) inadequate, he advocates an “imaginationist” solution, by which absolute music is not really or literally sad but is only imagined to be so in a variety of ways. In particular, he argues that we as listeners animate the music ourselves, imaginatively projecting life and mental states onto it. Bolstering his argument with empirical data from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science, Trivedi also addresses and explores larger philosophical questions such as the nature of emotions, metaphors, and imagination. Saam Trivedi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. (shrink)

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the leading figures of the French Enlightenment engaged in a philosophical debate about the nature of music. The principal participants-Rousseau, Diderot, and d'Alembert-were responding to the views of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, who was both a participant and increasingly a subject of controversy. The discussion centered upon three different events occurring roughly simultaneously. The first was Rameau's formulation of the principle of the fundamental bass, which explained the structure of chords and their (...) progression. The second was the writing of the Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, with articles on music by Rousseau. The third was the "Querelle des Bouffons," over the relative merits of Italian comic opera and French tragic opera. The philosophes, in the typical manner of Enlightenment thinkers, were able to move freely from the broad issues of philosophy and criticism, to the more technical questions of music theory, considering music as both art and science. Their dialogue was one of extraordinary depth and richness and dealt with some of the most fundamental issues of the French Enlightenment. In the newly revised edition of Music and the French Enlightenment, Cynthia Verba updates this fascinating story with the prolific scholarship that has emerged since the book was first published. Stressing the importance of seeing the philosophes' writings in context of a dynamic dialogue, Verba carefully reconstructs the chain of arguments and rebuttals across which Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot formulated their own evolving positions. A section of key passages in translation presents several texts in English for the first time, recapturing the tenor and tone of the dialogue at hand. In a new epilogue, Verba discusses important trends in new scholarship, tracing how scholars continue to grapple with many of the same fundamental oppositions and competing ideas that were debated by the philosophes in the French Enlightenment. (shrink)

The verbal and musical arts across languages and cultures -- The cognition of stories and poems -- In the beginning -- Poetry across languages and cultures -- First music and second music acquisition -- The origin of music in art and science -- Creationist pseudoscience in the American university -- New opportunities for narrative inquiry -- Theory and creativity in literary and musical education.

I review two recent books on music, both inspired by cognitive neuroscience but differing in most other respects. Isabelle Peretz, an expert in the cognitive neuroscience of music, describes how we perceive and produce music, as reflected in neural and behavioral re­sponsiveness. Her book is intended for general readers who are interested in music and curious about the science behind our musical nature-brains that are prepared for music and changed by active musical engagement. Lynn Helding, (...) an expert in vocal perfor­mance and pedagogy, draws on findings from psychology and neuroscience to inform her approach to music learning and teaching. Aimed at musicians, aspiring musicians, and those who teach them, her book focuses largely on the means of optimizing learning and skilled performance. (shrink)

Savage et al. do an excellent job of making the case for social bonding in general, but do a less good job of distinguishing the manners by which dance and music achieve this. It is important to see dance and music as two parallel and interactive mechanisms that employ the “group body” and “group voice,” respectively, in engendering social cohesion.

The sublime - that elusive encounter with overwhelming height, power or limits - has had a long relationship with music, from the early-modern rise of interest in the Longinian sublime to its saturation of European culture in the later nineteenth century and beyond. Music sits in productive tension with the sublime in many foundational texts. Yet sustained attention to this relationship has been relatively uncommon. Scholars in other fields have called for a moratorium on studies of the sublime, (...) yet there are remarkably few books dedicated to the sublime and music. Drawing together perspectives from musicology, sound studies, literary studies, intellectual history and theology, this collection offers a perspective on music that responds to current understandings of the sublime as a pre-disciplinary category traversing the arts, sciences and humanities. (shrink)

The discovery of incommensurability by the Pythagoreans is usually ascribed to geometric or arithmetic questions, but already Tannery stressed the hypothesis that it had a music-theoretical origin. In this paper, I try to show that such hypothesis is correct, and, in addition, I try to understand why it was almost completely ignored so far.

Is musicality an individual level adaptation? The authors of this target article reject the need for group selection within their model, yet their arguments do not fulfill the conceptual requirements for justifying such a rejection. Further analysis can highlight the explanatory value of embracing multilevel selection theory as a foundational element of the music and social bonding hypothesis.

This essay is prompted, in part, by a spate of alarmist articles in the media over the past several years concerning what journalists have called "the creativity crisis,"2 articles claiming, in other words, that American creativity is in decline. A corresponding call has arisen to seek remedies and determine how creativity might be fostered in the lives of children so as to stem the tide of this (alleged) decline. While taking these dramatic concerns and pronouncements cum grano salis, this article (...) responds, nevertheless, by extracting a set of themes drawn from the childhoods of three individuals whose remarkable contributions to the disparate fields of science, classical music, and visual art are beyond.. (shrink)

Publication date: 21 March 2019 Source: Author: Remi Chukwudi Okeke The impact of music on politics in Africa has seemingly remained dominant. But the overall sway of the African political processes has also become bewildering. The panacea to the disconcerting results of these political procedures in Africa is the adequate levels of social mobilization, while music ostensibly mobilizes massively. This chapter thus examines the linkages among politics, music and social mobilization in Nigeria. Framed on the hypothesis that (...) the relationship among politics, music and social mobilization in Nigeria is now downbeat and using the elite theoretical and the political economy frameworks of analyses, the authors study the intervening factors responsible for the observed gloom in what had amounted to progressive relationships among politics, music and social mobilization in Nigeria and the wider continent. The research setting is qualitative. The chapter delves into its premises through the historical and descriptive research methodologies and logical argumentation. (shrink)

Rock music, rap, and heavy metal are all forms of vulgar music. Vulgarity refers to actions and communication that are “common, noisy, and gross,” and are “untranscendent.” A technological society is a vulgar society in its base of materialism and exclusive concern with power. Its excessive rationality produces a need for escape, for ecstasy, for the release of instinctual power. Vulgar music mimics a technological society and provides compensation for its repressive impact.

In his account of musical interaction and temporality, Schutz's outer-inner distinction appears to capture a component of everyday experience. But engagement with Wittgensteinian philosophy reveals Schutz's false contrast between literal and metaphorical components of language, a series of philosophical confusions stemming from reifications of mental verbs, and the attribution of genuine duration to phenomena that have life as linguistic objects. Consequently, Schutz's intended account of social interaction comes to rest upon a radically private concept of the subject. A sociology of (...) time, it is concluded, can avoid these conceptual traps by attending to the linguistic component of temporality. (shrink)

Many scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, religion, history or social science have ventured to offer a comprehensive explanation of music, one of the most intangible and elusive phenomena in the world. A palaeoanthropological approach, which places music into an evolutionary paradigm, can add important perspectives to our understanding of this phenomenon. To begin with, the question whether music is an adaptation that has survival value in the classical Darwinian sense is contemplated. Views on the origin of music (...) in conjunction with the emergence of language and as a domain for the expression of emotion, linked to music’s benefits for social coherence, are discussed. More recent views on the emergence of consciousness, on semiosis and on music as a manifestation of biocultural co-evolution, especially in conjunction with ritual, are then presented. Finally, the merit of exploiting the concept of play to help account for the systematicity of music’s semiosis is examined.Contribution: In line with the intent of this special collection of articles, the above considerations are placed into the context of materialist versus nonmaterialist perspectives on the emergence of the human mind. The overarching argument is that music contributes crucially to what it means to be human. (shrink)

Philosophers of music (and also music theorists) have recognized for a long time that research in the sciences, especially psychology, might have import for their own work. (Langer 1941 and Meyer 1956 are good examples.) However, while scientists had been interested in music as a subject of research (e.g., Helmholtz 1912, Seashore 1938), the discipline known as psychology of music, or more broadly cognitive science of music, came into its own only around 1980 with the (...) publication of several landmark works. Among the most important of these were The Psychol- ogy of Music (1980), a collection of papers edited by the psychologist Diana Deutsch, and A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) by music theorist and composer Fred Lerdahl and linguist Ray Jackendoff. These works and others made possible the first attempts to apply scientific research to philosophical issues concerning music (e.g., Raffman 1993, DeBellis 1995). Since the 1980’s, of course, a great deal of research has been done in cognitive science, philosophy, and music. For philosophers, there are perhaps three topics with respect to which findings in the cognitive sciences are most likely to be germane—the nature of musical understanding, the role of emotions or feelings in music, and the evaluation of musical works. This brief overview will describe some of the scientific research that has been done on these topics, and then indicate how it might be philosophically significant. (shrink)

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. -/- In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences (...) of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. -/- Rather than pursuing the human’s beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human. (shrink)