Music, emotion, embodiment

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Music, emotion, embodiment

• Lawrence Zbikowski
• University of Chicago, Department of Music
• larry_at_uchicago.edu
• http//humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/zbikowski

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Musical grammar and emotion

• Music and language have very different functions
  in human culture
• One of the tenets of cognitive linguistics is
  that form and function (syntax and semantics) are
  intimately connected
• The forms basic to musical grammar are
  consequently quite different from those of
  linguistic grammar
• Among the functions of music within human culture
  is the induction and regulation of emotional
  states
• Musical grammar reflects this function

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• Music slides omitted

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Music, emotion, embodiment

• Music induces and regulates emotional states.
• Emotional responses, as a means of regulating the
  life of an organism, are thoroughly embodied and
  have an impact on cognitive processing.
• The emotional responses induced by music are
  different from those associated with the
  regulation of an organisms life.
• Work on analogy provides a framework for
  understanding the basis for emotional responses
  to music.
• Music written for social dance forms demonstrates
  how bodily movement can be correlated with
  musical sounds, and also suggests a key role for
  music in human culture.

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Two views of embodiment from Judith Becker

• the body as a physical structure in which emotion
  and its attendant physiological processes happen
• the body as a site of first-person experience
• Becker, Deep Listeners Music, Emotion, and
  Trancing (2004)

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• the basic response triad of emotion
  physiological arousal (changes in respiration and
  temperature sensation), motor expression (e.g.,
  facial expressions), and subjective feeling
• Emotions are episodes of coordinated changes in
  several components (including at least
  neurophysiological activation, motor expression,
  and subjective feeling but possibly also action
  tendencies and cognitive processes) in response
  to external or internal events of major
  significance to the organism.
• Klaus Scherer, Psychological Models of
  Emotion, in The Neuropsychology of Emotion, ed.
  Joan C. Borod, (Oxford Oxford University Press,
  2000), pp. 138-139.

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Emotions and rational thought(from Damasio)

• emotions complicated collections of chemical and
  neural responses that form a pattern, whose
  function is to create circumstances that are
  advantageous to the organism
• feelings neural images of the sensory patterns
  associated with emotions
• Consciousness allows feelings to be known and
  thus promotes the impact of emotion internally,
  allows emotion to permeate the thought process
  through the agency of feeling.
• Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens
  Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
  (New York Harcourt Brace Company, 1999), p.
  56

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• Physiological responses to emotional stimuli are
  proactive physiological responses to musical
  stimuli are diffusely reactive.
• (Klaus Scherer, Which Emotions Can be Induced
  by Music? What Are the Underlying Mechanisms? and
  How Can we Measure Them? Journal of New Music
  Research 33, no. 3 (2004) 239-251.)
• Iconicity musical structures share formal
  similarities with the structures of expressed or
  felt emotions.
• Need for an account of analogical processes, and
  for how perceptual information is transformed
  into conceptual knowledge.

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• Music slide omitted

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Analogs for dynamic processes set up by
Sagrerass El Colibri

• The streams of repeated notes correlate with the
  distinctive sound created by the beating of its
  wings and the active stasis of its hovering.
• The sudden movements of the performers left hand
  correlate with the birds movements between
  temporary points of repose.
• Blocks of materials map out the path of the bird
  among different flowers.
• Accented non-chord tones correlate with the
  dipping movements of bird as it feeds.
• The continuous and rapid succession of notes
  throughout the entire work correlates with the
  birds characteristic flight.

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• As defined by Antonio Damasio, a convergence zone
  is an amodal record of the combinatorial
  arrangements that bound the fragment records as
  they occurred in experience. There are
  convergence zones of different orders for
  example, those that bind features into entities,
  and those that bind entities into events or sets
  of events, but all register combinations of
  components in terms of coincidence or sequence,
  in space and time. (Damasio, Time-locked
  multiregional retroactivation 1989, 26)
• Once a set of conjunctive neurons in a
  convergence zone captures an activation pattern
  in a feature map, the conjunctive neurons can
  later reactivate the pattern in the absence of
  bottom-up sensory stimulation. While remembering
  a perceived object, for example, conjunctive
  neurons reenact the sensorimotor states that were
  active while encoding it. (Barsalou,
  Abstraction as dynamic interpretation in
  perceptual symbol systems 2005, 299)

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HUMMINGBIRD
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Simulators, Analogy, and Embodiment

• Just as there are simulators for categories,
  there are also simulators for relations (above
  and below) and for events (the flight of the
  hummingbird).
• The configuration of properties and relations
  encapsulated by the simulator for a category may,
  under certain circumstances, be applied to a
  different category, giving rise to analogy.
• In a like fashion, simulators for events can be
  applied to dynamic processes with which those
  events share structure and relations. In the case
  of music, this supports the sonic analogs for
  dynamic processes basic to musical grammar. Sonic
  analogs accordingly support the simulation of the
  event(s) with which they are correlated.

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A.B. Marx on the Waltz

• The waltz has two movements first each pair of
  dancers turns itself in a circle around its own
  center second the pair progresses with these
  continuous turns in a greater circumference until
  it reaches its starting place and the circle is
  closed. Each little circle is performed in
  two-times-three steps and is, as it were, the
  motive of the dance.
• Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition
  (183738), 2 55.

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Thomas Wilsons Diagram for Waltzing from A
description of the correct method of waltzing,
the truly fashionable species of dancing (1816)
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Sevin Yaramans diagram showing the path of
the dancers in waltzing from Revolving
embrace the waltz as sex, steps, and sound (2002)
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Marx Music and Dance in the Waltz

• At the very least the waltz must bring into
  prominence this basic motive of movement. Each
  measure, or, better, each phrase of two measures,
  must answer to the dance motive marking the first
  step firmly, and also the swinging turn of the
  dance. Where the measures do not point it out
  they must still favor it, by a melody which
  spiritedly turns away from the first note.
• Marx 183738, 2 55.

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• Music slides omitted

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Sonic analogs for dynamic processes

• Associated with emotions (cf. the iconicity of
  emotional responses to music, which are diffusely
  reactive)
• Also associated with bodily movement (correlation
  of music and dance)
• Sonic analogs related to gestureboth are
  analogical representations of dynamic processes
• Rely on analogical rather than symbolic reference
  (which is basic to human language)
• cf. C.S. Peirces notion of an icon

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Language and music

• The primary function of language is to direct the
  attention of another person to objects or
  concepts within a shared referential frame.
• cf. Michael Tomasello, The cultural origins of
  human cognition (1999)
• The primary function of music is to represent
  through patterned sound various dynamic processes
  that are central to human experience, including
  movements of the body, communicative gestures,
  and emotions.

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• Ritual and incorporation Both commemorative
  ceremonies and bodily practices . . . contain a
  measure of insurance against the process of
  cumulative questioning entailed in all discursive
  practices. This is the source of their importance
  and persistence as mnemonic systems. Every group,
  then, will entrust to bodily automatisms the
  values and categories which they are most anxious
  to conserve. They will know how well the past can
  be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented
  in the body.
• (Connerton, How Societies Remember 1989, 102)

• The primary function of music is to represent
  through patterned sound various dynamic processes
  that are central to human experience, including
  movements of the body, communicative gestures,
  and emotions.

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By way of summary . . .

• One of the primary functions of music within
  human culture is the induction and regulation of
  emotional states.
• Emotional responses are thoroughly embodied and
  have an impact on cognitive processing.
• The relationship between music and emotions is
  based on iconicity, which in turn relies on
  analogy.
• One way to account for the neurological basis of
  iconicity is through Lawrence Barsalous theory
  of perceptual symbol systems.
• Emotional responses to music are but one
  manifestation of the use of patterned sound to
  refer analogically to dynamic processes. Other
  key dynamic processes include bodily movements
  associated with dance, expressive gestures, and
  the movements of objects through space, all of
  which may be associated with commemoration.