Musical Imagery (review)

Musical Imagery, edited by Rolf Inge Godøy and Harald Jørgensen, is not only an excellent introduction to musical imagery in general, but is also the sole superior source of new research in this area. The book, as the reader learns in the preface, grew out of the Sixth International Conference on Systematic and Comparative Musicology, held in Oslo in 1999. As such, the volume mainly displays European research (although 5 out of the 19 authors are from North America), research that is very much practice-oriented as well as intra- and inter-disciplinary in nature, especially with regard to psychology, philosophy, education, cognition, ethnology, and technology. (Such interdisciplinary music research falls, in Europe, under the category of Systematic Musicology.) Musical Imagery is the fifth volume in the series Studies on New Music Research, edited by Marc Leman.

The editors of this volume are professors of music pedagogy (Mr. Jørgensen) and musicology (Mr. Godøy). Mr. Jørgensen is a specialist in instrumental music education at the Norwegian Academy of Music; Mr. Godøy is an expert on phenomenological music theory, cognitive music theory, music analysis, and music technology at the University of Oslo.

The book is about mental images of musical sound and their relationships to musical behavior. In the call for papers of the aforementioned conference, the term "musical imagery" was defined as "our mental capacity for imagining musical sound in the absence of a directly audible sound source, meaning that we can recall and re-experience or even invent new musical sound through our 'inner ear' " (p. ix). However, the contributors have provided such a variety of perspectives on the topic, with various definitions of musical imagery, that the reader finds a refreshing broadness in this volume. It is refreshing in the sense in that it shows how different approaches to such a complex area may have different results through the choice of research method.

The book is structured in two parts. Part one focuses on theoretical perspectives on musical imagery. Albrecht Schneider (Hamburg, Germany) and Mr. Godøy give a historical overview of the problem of musical imagery by summarizing many philosophical, psychological, and music-theoretical approaches. Petr Janata (Hanover, New Hampshire) discusses "neurophysiological mechanisms underlying auditory image formation in music" (p. 27), and Virpi Kalakoski (Helsinki, Finland) investigates the relationship between musical imagery and the working memory. The latter article convincingly presents a number of studies that "applied a dual task method in order to study the effects of speech, melodies and articulatory suppression on musical imagery. Musical imagery was measured by pitch comparison and melody recognition/recall tasks" (p. 52). The Belgian researcher Marc Leman (Ghent) introduces two computer-simulated models of perceptually constrained spatio-temporal representations of musical images: a model of a statistical long-term memory and a model of an episodic long-term memory. The modeling described in his article is part of one of the largest and most successful European research projects on computer-assisted music analysis, specifically on the perception-based analysis of music.

Further "theoretical perspectives" that are presented in part one include a piece on mental images of musical scales by Christiane Neuhaus (Hamburg, Germany), on complex inharmonic sounds and perceptual ambiguity related to musical imagery by A. Schneider, on sensory processing and ideomotor simulation by Mark Reybrouck (Varsenare, Belgium), on schemata of emotional expression in music by Dalia Cohen and Edna Inbar (Jerusalem, Israel), and on the relationships between visual and musical images by Kostas Giannakis and Matt Smith (London, UK).

Part two focuses on the application of musical imagery in performance and composition. The most interesting question here is probably how musicians can enhance images of musical sound through expressive performance, whereby expressivity denotes the "human" aspect...