Special Feature: "Art and the Brain Part III"

Edited by Joseph A. Goguen and Erik Myin

Joseph A. Goguen & Erik Myin   full text
Editorial Introduction
Mari Tervaniemi & Elvira Brattico     abstract
From Sounds to Music: Towards Understanding the Neurocognition of Musical Sound Perception
Bruce F. Katz    abstract
A Measure of Musical Preferance
Neus Barrantes-Vidal    abstract
Creativity and Madness Revisited from Current Psychological Perspectives
Ivar Hagendoorn     abstract
Some Speculative Hypotheses about the Nature and Perception of Dance and Choreography
Erich Harth     full text
Art and Reductionism
Joseph A. Goguen     abstract
Musical Qualia, Context, Time and Emotion
Amy Ione     abstract
Klee and Kandinsky: Polyphonic Painting, Chromatic Chords and Synaesthesia
Vijay Iyer     abstract
Improvisation, Temporality and Embodied Experience
David Borgo     abstract
The Play of Meaning and the Meaning of Play in Jazz

TEN YEAR CUMULATIVE INDEX

Ten Year Index of Authors
Ten Year Index of Titles

ABSTRACTS

Neus Barrantes-Vidal

Creativity & Madness Revisited from Current Psychological Perspectives

Abstract: Both scientific evidence and folklore have suggested that madness is associated with creativity, especially in the arts. Recently, more rigorous studies have confirmed to some extent these previous observations. The current view is that it is not severe and acute insanity that is related to heightened creativity, but the personality roots and soft manifestations of both schizophrenic and bipolar psychoses. The affective and cognitive peculiarities associated with schizotypic and hypomanic personalities may be preferentially related to different kinds of creative endeavours, such as the sciences and arts, respectively. The connection between personality traits and creativity is produced because they share some biological–cognitive–personality features, such as cognitive disinhibition. Additionally, it has been shown that the genetic liability for both bipolar and schizophrenic psychoses is related to creativity. A prevailing hypothesis is that creativity may be one type of ‘compensatory advantage’ for those carrying the genes for psychosis.

Correspondence: Neus Barrantes-Vidal, Departament de Psicologia de la Salut, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat Autònome de Barceleona, 08193-Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain. Email: neus.barrantes@uab.es

David Borgo

The Play of Meaning and the Meaning of Play in Jazz

Trumpeter Don Cherry was fond of saying that ‘there is nothing more serious than fun’. And philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer (1993, p.102) seems to echo his words when he writes: ‘Seriousness is not merely something that calls us away from play; rather, seriousness in playing is necessary to make the play wholly play’. Individuals, communities and cultures the world over delight in the play of musical sound and debate its play of meanings. For specialists, musical discussion often hinges on cryptic symbols and impenetrable codes, but for everyone, understanding music relies on basic cognitive and social processes. By musicking together — to borrow Christopher Smalls’ (1998) evocative phrase for taking part in any way in musical activity — we bond with one another and create shared meanings. We also define or express ourselves within and against a musical community and a historical and cultural tradition.

The world of jazz as a tradition provides a rich context for investigating the relationship between formal musical syntax, social interactive processes and cognitive and cultural understandings. In this essay I explore original jazz performances by John Coltrane (A Love Supreme) and Sonny Rollins (Freedom Suite) and recent reinterpretations by other artists for insight into the cognitive and social processes through which musical meanings are negotiated and renegotiated. My analysis draws on work in cognitive science with categorization and conceptual mapping and on the notion of signifyin(g) first proposed by Henry Louis Gates (1988) for African American cultural studies.

Correspondence: David Borgo, Music Department, University of California at san Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093-0326, USA. Email: dborgo@ucsd.edu

Joseph A. Goguen

Musical Qualia, Context, Time and Emotion

Abstract: Nearly all listeners consider the subjective aspects of music, such as its emotional tone, to have primary importance. But contemporary philosophers often downplay, ignore, or even deny such aspects of experience. Moreover, traditional philosophies of music try to decontextualize it. Using music as an example, this paper explores the structure of qualitative experience, demonstrating that it is multi-layer emergent, non-compositional, enacted, and situation dependent, among other non-Cartesian properties. Our explanations draw on recent work in cognitive science, including blending, image schemas, and sensory memory, as well as on phenomenology. A hierarchical structure transformation based complexity theory is applied to obtain a non-linear dynamical systems explanation of qualia and emotion that respects phenomenological insights about time, including retention and protention. The complexity measure provides both a metric structure and a potential function, on spaces of pieces that are constructed using given elements and transformations, with weights that reflect their cognitive difficulty. However, the approach is not reductionist; using improvisation and the evolution of musical notation as data, we argue that situatedness, especially enactment and social context, are key aspects of musical consciousness.

Correspondence: Professor J.A. Goguen, Dept of Computer Science & Engineering, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0114, USA. Email: Goguen@cs.ucsd.edu

Ivar Hagendoorn

Some Speculative Hypotheses about the Nature and Perception of Dance and Choreography

The present article draws an itinerary through various brain structures and shows how these may combine to ultimately give rise to the sensations we experience when watching a dance performance. Since watching dance is essentially a visual experience the present analysis concentrates on visual processing. This is not to deny that music is an integral part of most dance performances or that movements produce noise, which may influence visual processing and in the absence of a visual component elicit visual images. But, to state the obvious, if the stage lights go out the audience’s experience of the dancers’ movements will be impaired. I should emphasize that the itinerary chosen here is only one of many routes that participate in the processing of dance, although I believe it to be a main route. At the start of this itinerary lies the observation that neural processing delays interfere with both perception and action. This problem is at once illustrated and brought to the fore in both the perception and practice of dance. Several authors have proposed in various forms that the brain compensates for these delays by creating predictions of forthcoming sensory and motor events (e.g. Berthoz, 2000; Kawato et al., 1987; Wolpert & Flanagan, 2001; Engel et al., 2001). Based on these considerations I will advance two hypotheses. I will argue that the deviation from and correspondence between the actual motion trajectory of a moving object and the trajectory as predicted by the brain of the observer, gives rise to two distinct emotional responses, analogous to the euphoria and frustration of catching or missing a ball. Through their sequential interplay these responses may reinforce each other to give rise to the feelings one can experience when watching dance. As a corollary I will argue that in forming a prediction of a moving object’s motion trajectory the brain engages in a form of motor imagery which, through a different route, may contribute to a state of arousal.

Correspondence: ivar@ivarhagendoorn.com

Amy Ione

Klee and Kandinsky: Polyphonic Painting, Chromatic Chords and Synaesthesia

As an artist I admittedly scrutinize all of the theories related to the arts closely. I do this for a number of reasons. The obvious one is that I have a deeply felt personal relationship with the subject matter. Less obvious is my experience in general. My early research was motivated by a desire to discover the historical circumstances that led to the difficulty in fitting visual art (as I knew it in my studio) into the discussions I encountered. Generally, it seemed that the dominant framework trivialized what I considered the most important aspects of the creative process. Over time I concluded that developing an interdisciplinary approach offered the best option for expanding views, although it is not an easy task. Establishing areas of commonality across a range of disciplines must somehow accommodate the ways in which each has developed a research agenda that seems to serve its core needs. In consciousness studies, for example, we have a field that relies heavily on scientific research and humanistic methodologies when building the philosophical models scholars use to structure theories. This methodology is not only removed from the nuts and bolts of art, it is also easily manipulated in discourse on art due to the ease with which we can fit aspects of art (e.g., aesthetics) into the philosophical framework. Clearly this approach fits nicely with philosophically defined concepts such as meaning, emotion, and other elusive modes. In addition, using the well-honed categories aids in bracketing themes such as metaphor, interpretation, subjectivity, language and history. Nonetheless, in reading through the studies, I repeatedly conclude that the voices of practitioners need to be included to a greater degree.

It is with these thoughts in mind that this paper turns to the practices of two artists, Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky. These men, who appear quite similar at first glance, brought differing approaches and philosophical dispositions to their studios, writings, and teaching pursuits. Case studies that delineate their differences allow us to, albeit briefly, engage with diverging viewpoints even while we seek confluence. Thus the summaries below, while not at all representative of the totality of art, do nonetheless allow some engagement with nuanced information. Also, in an effort to relate these two men to my overall research concerns, a truncated survey of neuroscientific/consciousness themes related to the work of the artists discussed is included to round out the discussion.

Correspondence: Amy Ione, The Diatrope Institute, PO Box 6813, Santa Rosa, CA 95406, USA. Email: ione@diatrope.com

Vijay Iyer

Improvisation,Temporality and Embodied Experience

This journal’s well-intentioned consideration of the arts has turned out to be quite the Pandora’s box. As soon as we broach the subject of aesthetics, we are already in the realm of ideology; as soon as we impose the frame of scientific inquiry upon any subject, we invoke another kind of ideology. The previous issues in this series have depicted the unfolding of an ideological clash of cultures between sciences and the humanities, enough to make C.P. Snow blush. For the time being, this is an unavoidable condition; yet the more we remain aware of it, the further we may push our insights.

In my previous work (Iyer, 1998; 2002; 2004), I have brought the dual frameworks of embodied and situated cognition to bear on music. The fundamental claim is that music perception and cognition are embodied, situated activities. This means that they depend crucially on the physical constraints and enabling of our sensorimotor apparatus, and also on the ecological and sociocultural environment in which our music-listening and -producing capacities come into being. I have argued that rhythm perception and production involve a complex, whole-body experience, and that much musical structure incorporates an awareness of the embodied, situated role of the participant.

In this paper I focus specifically on improvisational music, and on what it can tell us about consciousness and cognition. Building upon the notion of cognition as embodied action, I would like to propose an understanding of certain improvisational music as quintessentially experiential, in that it leads us to re-experience our own practice of perception.

Correspondence: Vijay Iyer, 606 West 116th Street #2, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: vijay@vijay-iyer.com

Bruce F. Katz

A Measure of Musical Preference

Music exists not to be parsed, categorized, or otherwise processed, but because it provides enjoyment. Thus methodologies that concentrate on the cognitive aspects of music alone omit what is essential about this aesthetic form. This paper provides an alternative approach by proposing a measure of musical preference. Specifically, it is argued that a musical passage will be preferred to the extent that it induces synchrony in those brain structures that are responsible for processing the passage. It is first shown that this conception is consistent with time-honored principle of unity in diversity. It is then argued that the synchrony measure follows from more recent results regarding a possible solution to the binding problem. The bulk of the paper, however, is concerned with verifying the measure via simulation. It is shown, in particular, that the measure applied to a network of interacting integrate and fire neurons responsible for the processing of musical stimuli produces results consistent with human musical preference. This was carried out in three areas in the context of Western classical and popular musical forms. First, the model was applied to the laws of voice leading and other principles developed in the period of common harmonic practice. Next, it was shown that the three most salient aspects of melody, the preponderance of stepwise transitions, the theme and variation nature of phrase development, and increased positive affect with exposure all follow directly from the model. Finally, it was demonstrated how a steady rhythm can increase neural synchrony and presumably positive affect. Additional simulations run on Turkish art songs show that the synchrony measure may have some applicability to non-Western musical forms. The paper concludes by arguing that the synchrony measure may, in certain cases, apply to non-musical aesthetic stimuli.

Correspondence: Bruce F. Katz, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. Email: katz@cbis.drexel.edu

Mari Tervaniemi & Elvira Brattico

From Sounds to Music: Towards Understanding the Neurocognition of Musical Sound Perception

Abstract: In this chapter we present a new approach to research in music perception allowing one to investigate how musical sound representations are formed in the human brain. By studying subjects’ brain responses to unattended stimuli we can determine, for instance, whether neural circuits are more readily activated by musical sounds implicitly learned than by unfamiliar sounds even in non-musicians. Indeed, neuronal populations seem to respond more efficiently to pitch deviations within sound patterns following the rules of Western scale structure, rather than to deviations inside patterns artificially created. Moreover, neural circuits are selectively activated by mistunings inside tonal melodies or by out-of-key chords inside harmonic cadences even when attention is not directed towards the sounds. These data together suggest that incoming sounds are more efficiently processed when they match the neural templates derived from our musical culture. The existence of ‘musical memories’ in the auditory cortex that are effortlessly activated enabling us, e.g., to identify and recognize speech vs. music sounds can thus be postulated.

Correspondence: Mari Tervaniemi, Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology, P.O. Box 9, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. Email: mari.tervaniemi@helsinki.fi

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