Rethinking gesture theory via embodiment and acousmatic music
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Date
2021-12-16
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Ohio State University. Libraries
Abstract
The crucial role of embodiment in perceiving music is increasingly well documented by cognitive scientists and music theorists. Less thoroughly explored is the role that embodied cognition plays in our hearing of acousmatic music. Primarily produced on digital audio workstations, and diffused through loudspeakers, this genre of music has often been critiqued because the sources producing the sound do not neatly map onto specific sound-producing actions.
This paper proposes an analytical model utilizing gesture theory (Leman and Godøy, 2010) in framing an embodied listening approach to acousmatic music. Gesture, defined as a "pattern through which we structure our environment through actions," (Leman and Godøy, 2010), allows listeners to assign specific musical meaning to the disembodied sounds. The model focuses specifically on sound-tracing gestures that "follow the contour of sonic elements" (Godøy et al., 2006) of the acousmatic track. A multidimensional analytic approach focused on three parameters crucial to contour understanding (localization, causality, mobility) (Frengel, 2010) in acousmatic music is applied to Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco. This work thus broadens the scope of an embodied approach to music cognition as it applies to music analysis.
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Keywords
embodied cognition, gesture, embodiment, electroacoustic music, acousmatic music
Citation
Future Directions of Music Cognition (2021), pp. 174-176