Music performance and the mediality of acoustic music instruments: an Activity Theory Perspective

Intro and problem- Music performance is all about the expressive communication of artistic ideas. To express these ideas to an audience, musicians depend on their musical instrument. Within the embodied music cognition paradigm the musical instrument is considered to be a multimodal technology that mediates between the performers mind (musical ideas) and physical energy (the sounding music) (Leman, 2007). But what exactly does this mediating role consists of? Is the musical instrument a mere material channel through which pre-defined meaning is transferred to the listener? Or does it play a constitutive role for the generation and communication of musical meaning? Approach- The idea that a medium shapes meaning is captured by the notion of mediality (e.g. Seifert, Kim, & Moore, 2008). It refers to the disposition of the medium and its operations that establish a specific relationship between medium (musical instrument) and mediatised (musical ideas). This paper presents a theoretical investigation of the mediality of acoustic music instruments by appealing to Activity Theory. This theory holds that the human mind is conceived of as the product of our interaction with people and artefacts in the context of everyday activity (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006). Through a set of principles (e.g. merging of activity and consciousness, object-orientedness, internalization and externalization), this theoretical framework provides useful concepts (e.g. Object, operations, functional organ) to investigate the influence of the musical instrumen