Investigating the Musical Mind: Situated Cognition, Artistic Human-Robot Interaction Design, and Cognitive Musicology

There are different domains in which convergence might take place. Within the arts we can think of the convergence of different forms of expressive media such as music, theater, film, and dance. Concerning media, we also may think of convergence of technical representations of different kinds of modalities as in multimedia and multi-modal environments. Furthermore, in the sciences one can think of convergence of different approaches to research questions. Artistic human-robot interaction design with schema theory might provide a basis for the study of subjective and objective mind using new media art environments as laboratories. The subjective or individual mind is normally studied in cognitive science. The objective mind or culture is studied within the humanities. Cognitive science as situated cognition and the humanities might converge in investigating the mind. Cognitive musicology is given as an example of a possible converging way of studying the subjective and objective mind. The use of robots plays an essential part of such a converging approach. Artistic human-robot interaction design is proposed as a research strategy. Social schema theory is related to artistic human-robot interaction design. The humanities, I think, should actively take part in the formation of a society in which humans are socially interacting with robots or artificial agents in daily life, art, entertainment, edutainment, therapy, and teaching.