This week in my current trends course, we discussed embodiment. The structure of the class is such that each week, we cover a new topic. On Tuesday, we read literature from the non-musical sphere; on Thursday, we look at musical applications of those theories. For example, when we discussed gender and music theory, we read selections from Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex and Judith Butler's Gender trouble. On Thursday, then, we read Fred Maus's "Sexual categories and musical categories" and Suzanne Cusick's "Feminist theory, music theory, and the mind/body problem." Of all of the topics we're discussing in this class, I had the most difficult time finding a general reading for embodiment (I'll still take suggestions!). I had considered "Toward an embodied cognitive science" by Andy Clark, and eventually settled on Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" I enjoyed the thought experiment that the article takes the reader through; I'm not sure my students got from it what I was hoping they would.
So I decided to assemble a little lecture along the lines of "what embodiment means to me." A sort of transcript of that lecture appears below.
I positioned Descartes' formulation "I think, therefore I am" as the point where the mind and the body were initially separated. According to Descartes, there are concepts and ideals that exist only in the mind, and that we can even rationalize our bodies using simply our minds. Descartes tries to disprove his own theory by suggesting that we might simply be brains in a jar (I'm paraphrasing, of course) and that our whole reality might be the work of an Evil Deceiver, who could be deceiving us about not only our existence, but also everything else that we hold to be true (2+2 might not really equal 4 if there was an Evil Deceiver).
I then got into some "problems" of consciousness that make some of Descartes' formulations problematic. We discussed here "what it is like to be a bat," the idea being, if an organism has consciousness, there must be something it is like to be that creature. Nagel tries to get us to embody "bat-ness," pointing out the problems inherent in the approach as he goes. More interesting to my mind* is Michael Tye's book, Ten problems of consciousness. We went through each of the problems, giving examples as I went. Of particular interest to our present class were the last two:
The first problem is that when we feel something we actually feel it in our mind, not in the place where we perceive it. For example, if we prick our finger on a thorn, it feels like the pain is in our finger, but in actuality, it's really felt only in our brain. This is borne out in cases such as those documented by Oliver Sacks. We looked at a few cases from his The man who mistook his wife for a hat, including the case of a sailor who had his right pinky amputated, but continued to feel it for some 40 years--to the point where he was still worried about poking himself with the phantom finger.
The second problem also alludes to a condition documented by Sacks. He recounts the story of a patient who wound up on the floor one night after finding a severed leg in his bed. He tried to throw the leg out of the bed, but it turns out that it was in fact his leg. He believed that his leg was an alien limb that didn't belong to him: when he threw it out of the bed, the rest of him followed.
The task of embodiment argues that our bodies are necessary and inseparable from our minds. Many of the conceptual metaphors (a la Lakoff and Johnson) that we use to structure our everyday experiences are rooted in the orientation of our bodies in space. This dependence upon our bodies goes beyond using our senses (which are certainly important). All of our socially constructed notions of gender, disability, and the like have a body (or, more accurately, the idea of bodily difference) at their core. We also discussed how tool usage in the conventional sense (i.e., hammers, violins, etc.) as well as the more abstract sense (i.e., words, language, writing) enable us to think about our world.
We moved on from here to ecological perception, much of which was taken from the Clark article mentioned above as well as a book by Eric Clarke called Ways of listening. For our purposes, we focused on the following aspects:
In this scene, Chaplin's movements are not musical per se, but they embody some of the characteristics associated with making those sounds on an instrument.
Fundamentally, an embodied theory of music positions music as something bodies do and suggests that we comprehend music in terms of our body's familiarity with the movements required to produce these sounds. Elsewhere in the literature, Godoy and his colleagues have done some fascinating work on air-instrument playing, studying non-musicians and expert musicians. I won't spoil the ending, but the articles are quite interesting.
On Thursday, we did a little experiment. I had the students play air-piano to a recording of Glenn Gould playing Liszt's transcription of the slow movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony. I then had them play air-something to a recording of the orchestral version of the same piece and had them describe the difference between the two experiences. There is a great sentence in one of Godoy's articles. He writes: “The point is that orchestration affords an intrinsic choreography of sound-producing gestures, a choreography that in turn may be appreciated by listeners as rich gestural affordances of the orchestral sound.” One of my students proved this point exactly when he said that he had a difficult time deciding which air instrument to play during the orchestral version.
I'd welcome any comments, suggested reading, etc. on this post. It's a fascinating topic to me, one that I think is still very much in its infancy, but one that has the potential to be very rewarding.
*In a jar or not.
So I decided to assemble a little lecture along the lines of "what embodiment means to me." A sort of transcript of that lecture appears below.
I positioned Descartes' formulation "I think, therefore I am" as the point where the mind and the body were initially separated. According to Descartes, there are concepts and ideals that exist only in the mind, and that we can even rationalize our bodies using simply our minds. Descartes tries to disprove his own theory by suggesting that we might simply be brains in a jar (I'm paraphrasing, of course) and that our whole reality might be the work of an Evil Deceiver, who could be deceiving us about not only our existence, but also everything else that we hold to be true (2+2 might not really equal 4 if there was an Evil Deceiver).
I then got into some "problems" of consciousness that make some of Descartes' formulations problematic. We discussed here "what it is like to be a bat," the idea being, if an organism has consciousness, there must be something it is like to be that creature. Nagel tries to get us to embody "bat-ness," pointing out the problems inherent in the approach as he goes. More interesting to my mind* is Michael Tye's book, Ten problems of consciousness. We went through each of the problems, giving examples as I went. Of particular interest to our present class were the last two:
9. The problem of the felt location
10. The problem of the alien limb
The first problem is that when we feel something we actually feel it in our mind, not in the place where we perceive it. For example, if we prick our finger on a thorn, it feels like the pain is in our finger, but in actuality, it's really felt only in our brain. This is borne out in cases such as those documented by Oliver Sacks. We looked at a few cases from his The man who mistook his wife for a hat, including the case of a sailor who had his right pinky amputated, but continued to feel it for some 40 years--to the point where he was still worried about poking himself with the phantom finger.
The second problem also alludes to a condition documented by Sacks. He recounts the story of a patient who wound up on the floor one night after finding a severed leg in his bed. He tried to throw the leg out of the bed, but it turns out that it was in fact his leg. He believed that his leg was an alien limb that didn't belong to him: when he threw it out of the bed, the rest of him followed.
The task of embodiment argues that our bodies are necessary and inseparable from our minds. Many of the conceptual metaphors (a la Lakoff and Johnson) that we use to structure our everyday experiences are rooted in the orientation of our bodies in space. This dependence upon our bodies goes beyond using our senses (which are certainly important). All of our socially constructed notions of gender, disability, and the like have a body (or, more accurately, the idea of bodily difference) at their core. We also discussed how tool usage in the conventional sense (i.e., hammers, violins, etc.) as well as the more abstract sense (i.e., words, language, writing) enable us to think about our world.
We moved on from here to ecological perception, much of which was taken from the Clark article mentioned above as well as a book by Eric Clarke called Ways of listening. For our purposes, we focused on the following aspects:
That our bodies interaction with our environment in meaningful ways. In some cases, our environment governs how our bodies operate. Clark gives the example of the bluefin tuna which, on paper, is not a very strong swimmer. As a result of its ability to interact with its environment and read currents, create vortices with its tail, etc., it's actually one of the stronger swimmers in the ocean.
The perception-action cycle. Sounds stimulate us to do things. When the mailman opens the mailbox outside my front door, my dog recognizes that sound and comes immediately to the defense of our house. My dog's barking stimulates me to chase him around the house in an attempt to quiet him down and reassure him that nothing is wrong.
Learning as differentiation. Our environment is a complex, chaotic amalgamation of things, sounds, stimuli. As we grow, we learn to distinguish among the objects that comprise our environment. Musically speaking, studies have shown that inexperienced listeners recognize a chord as a single object; trained musicians can discriminate the individual tones.
Affordance (which is closely related to the perception-action cycle). Any stimulus affords a rich web of possible gestures. In a chapter in a forthcoming book on music and gesture, Rolf Inge Godoy provides a great example of this from the Charlie Chaplin film, The great dictator:
In this scene, Chaplin's movements are not musical per se, but they embody some of the characteristics associated with making those sounds on an instrument.
Fundamentally, an embodied theory of music positions music as something bodies do and suggests that we comprehend music in terms of our body's familiarity with the movements required to produce these sounds. Elsewhere in the literature, Godoy and his colleagues have done some fascinating work on air-instrument playing, studying non-musicians and expert musicians. I won't spoil the ending, but the articles are quite interesting.
On Thursday, we did a little experiment. I had the students play air-piano to a recording of Glenn Gould playing Liszt's transcription of the slow movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony. I then had them play air-something to a recording of the orchestral version of the same piece and had them describe the difference between the two experiences. There is a great sentence in one of Godoy's articles. He writes: “The point is that orchestration affords an intrinsic choreography of sound-producing gestures, a choreography that in turn may be appreciated by listeners as rich gestural affordances of the orchestral sound.” One of my students proved this point exactly when he said that he had a difficult time deciding which air instrument to play during the orchestral version.
I'd welcome any comments, suggested reading, etc. on this post. It's a fascinating topic to me, one that I think is still very much in its infancy, but one that has the potential to be very rewarding.
*In a jar or not.