Listening to Contemporary Art Music: A Morphodynamic Model of Cognition

Abstract

This paper proposes that the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved when listening to certain genres within "sound-based" music, such as post-spectralism, glitch-electronica, and electroacoustic music and in various areas of sound art, are best understood within a connectionist cognitive framework described by morphodynamic theory. By analysing the specific characteristics of sound-based music, it is explored how this kind of music works at perceptual and cognitive levels. The sound patterns found in these pieces engage listeners more readily at a phenomenological level rather than through establishing long-term conceptual associations. They consist of a set of geometries in motion appearing to the listener as "image schemata", as they embody Gestalt and kinaesthetic principles portraying the forces and tensions of our being in the physical world (e.g., figure-background, near-far, superimposition, compulsion, blockage). In applying morphodynamic theory to the listening process involved in this kind of music, this paper discusses the results of a listening survey designed to investigate the functional isomorphism between sound patterns and image schemata. The results suggest that this music can be seen as a mean term within a connectionist model between the acoustic-physical world and the symbolic level. This original perspective opens up new pathways to access this kind of music and leads to a more general understanding of today's modes of listening.

Keywords: Auditory Gestalt; Cross-modal Perception; Embodied cognition; Morphodynamic Theory; Sound-based Music.

Figure 1

Spectrogram [30 – 5700 Hz/31’11” – 35’21”/bars 343 – 413] of Haas’ in vain (2000).

Figure 2

Left side: schematic representation of the results sorted by participants’ musical training. Bar graphs where pale grey bars represent “dynamic” drawings (linear and spectrotemporal evolution) and dark grey bars represent “static” drawings (Static portrait). Right side: the nine pairs of drawings.

Figure 3

Top: pitch-based representation of interlaced glissandi of Haas’ String Quartet nº2, bars 87 – 96 [06’45” – 07’25”]; Bottom: corresponding drawings.

Figure 4

Top: spectrogram [59 – 2000 Hz/15’27” – 17’08”/bars 215 – 227] of Haas’ String Quartet nº2. Bottom: corresponding drawings.

Figure 5

Schematic representation of the multi-level pathway which connects the physical level to the symbolic level (Petitot, 2011).