Music, Cognition and Culture

SPECIAL SECTION INTRODCCTION Music, Cognition and Culture s ^ ■ ^ ^ ince the inception of Leonardo MusicJournal, a main purpose of this publication has been to explore interdisciplinary perspectives on music. "Sounding the Mind" includes work that represents methodologies and theories about music and mind from areas that bridge cognitive sci­ ence, ethnomusicology and music theory. As a whole, the section addresses one of the most critical processes in music: the feedback between music making and music perception, between generative aspects (performing, composing, improvis­ ing) and interpretive levels (hearing, listening, responding). This is perhaps the most neglected area of study in the field of music cognition today. Its depth requires the inclusion of cultural context as a crucial factor in evaluating the universality or relativism of music perception. The intellectually sensitive issues of cultural factors and experimental methods in music research are not directly addressed by the articles in this section. Instead, each stands as a contribution to knowledge about music and mind outside of factional debates inherent by definition in what comes to be known as a "field of study" or an "academic discipline." A basic premise of the section is the fun­ damental assumption that both the humanistic (gathering evidence by induction) and scientific (ob­ taining evidence by hypothesis testing) approaches are valid and relevant when they respect each other's strengths and guard against each other's pitfalls. Within the greater community of music and technology, we have the opportunity to demonstrate the power of truly interdisciplinary creative and academic work. Cognitive science is research in thinking. Originally the convergence of computational linguistics, cognitive psychology and computer science, cognitive science is currently placed squarely in the middle of several major debates about human nature, which are centering around the following three areas: 1. Explorations ofthe nativist/empiridst question, i.e. of the respective roles of learning and inheritance in human behavior. Most of the theoretical work in this area is concerned with language acquisition and the evolution of brain mechanisms for speech and language processing [1]. 2. Challenges to traditional notions of mental structure and the mind's representation of our world. The bulk of work in this direction attempts to define through psychological testing, to model through com­ puter programs that learn to categorize without being specifically taught, to understand and even to "create" thinking [2]. Proceeding along established philosophical trains of thought, such as Wittgenstein's speculation on the principles of categorization and naming, the latest developments in what was the area of Arti­ ficial Intelligence (AI) are new paradigms of how the mind works. For example, the new field of Ar­ tificial Life is involved in the development of computer systems that learn through evolution and in­ teraction with their surroundings, i.e. their local cultural context. Marvin Minsky, the architect of AI, has stated that the new challenge for cognitive science is to model how a 7-year-old child thinks. Abandoning the outmoded view that logical systems are the most effective decision makers, AI is now on a quest to model common-sense understanding. 3. Multiple Brains. The third stream of thought is what I call first- and second-brain integration. Our "first brain" is that instinctually responsive brain that responds before "knowing." We sometimes re­ fer to this as "preconscious" or "preattentive" response. Our "second brain" deals with the awareness of feeling, intuition, analytical evaluation, categorization and judgment. Ornstein [3] has proposed the multiple-working-brain concept to explain many everyday human responses and modes of com­ munication that are otherwise inappropriate to our current environment. One of the breakthroughs in this general approach has been the recognition that feeling, rather than logical conception, could be the root of mental activity—as well as the basis for creative and artistic expression [4]. These three major groups of ideas incorporate a wide area of practices and theories, ranging from new ways of considering old notions of conscious and unconscious mind and behavior to the inclu­ sion of the most basic instinctual behavior as a "subtext" of logical functioning. Of growing impor­ tance in cognitive science—as it includes natural computation and experimental and cognitive psy­ chology—is the study of symbolization, expression and the involvement...