Music as sound: an experiential approach to musical sense-making

Musicology has espoused traditionally a structural approach to the study of music, conceiving of it as an ontological object that can be reified in a rather static way. Music, in this view, is represented mostly at a symbolic level without any connection to its sounding qualities. Musical sense-making as a perceptual experience, however, should reflect the sonorous unfolding through time with continuous allocations of focal attention by the listener. There is need, therefore, of a theoretical framework for sense-making of the music-as-heard, revolving around the musical experience, which is characterized by a processual approach to the sounding articulation over time. Music sense-making, accordingly, can be considered as the result of epistemic interactions with the sounds. These interactions can proceed ‘in time’ at the perceptual level or ‘out-of-time’ in a kind of symbolic space. As such, there has been a paradigm shift in recent musicological research that introduces the listener and the role of the musical experience with a major emphasis on musical knowledge construction and sense-making while listening to music as it sounds. In an attempt to provide a theoretical and operational framework to this processual approach, this contribution brings together insights from the domains of deixis, narratology and morphodynamics. Starting from the conceptual framework of deixis and indexical devices, it elaborates on the concept of pointing as a heuristic guide for sense-making, with the listerer being considered as a point of reference for a referential exchange between the listener and the sounding music. It allows the listener to pick up elements from the sounding flux and to conceive of them in terms of salience, valence and semantical weight. This act of mental pointing, further, can be predicative in either a nominalistic or processual way, giving a descripton of the temporal evolution of the music as against episodic nominalizations that refer to just a single instance of the process. Relying on existing concepts such as cue abstraction, route-description and cognitive maps, it introduces an operational framework that does justice to the mental organisation of the music-as-heard. This involves the extraction and denotation of singular particulars from the sounding flux as well as their relational continuity. To the extent that the latter can be conceived as a mental map of a kind of story, it is possible to introduce an aspect of discursivity and narrative comprehension in the temporal organization of the music, relying heavily on some older philosophical theories of time. The acts of mental pointing, further, can be either focal (points) or extended in time (zones) as exemplified in the gestural approach to musical sense-making. Gestures—both at a manifest and at an internalized level—can be helpful in grasping the experience of continuity, which is so typical for real-time listening to music as it unfolds through time. As such, it is related to the morphodynamical approach, which provides a description of typical patterns of temporal unfolding and their dynamic transformations.status: accepte