Music as ongoing knowledge construction : from sound to meaning

This paper is about musical sense-making in a real-time listening situation, arguing for an active conception of listening that goes beyond a passive immersion in the sounds. Conceiving of listening as a way of coping with the sounds, it defines musical sense-making as an ongoing process of knowledge construction as the outcome of interactions with the sounds, both at a manifest or internalized level. Music listening, in this view, is seen as a complex task that embraces several layers of interacting, such as the sensory, physiological, behavioral, and cognitive one, which all contribute to the building up of music knowledge in a dynamic and experiential way. Such a broader approach to musical sense-making stresses the lived experience of music as a sounding structure that evolves over time, not in a disembodied, disconnected, and detached way, but in a way that favors an embodied and experiential approach, as exemplified most typically in the musical-aesthetic experience. Major points that are dealt with are the in-time and outside-of-time approach to music, the real-time processing of music and its measurement, the concept of interactions with the sounds and sound-producing devices, the special role of epistemic interactions, the distinction between the dynamicist and computationalist approach to sense-making, and the corresponding transition from sound to meaning