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Ian Cross' Keynote:
Scientific approaches to the experience of music emerge in their current form in the post-war cognitive revolution and maintain an uneasy relationship to other strands of music scholarship — for some integral to the proper understanding of music, for others irrelevant or even deleterious. Early approaches treated music as auditory pattern, and my own work in the early eighties conformed to that tendency. In order to probe behind appearances we investigated the perception of highly reduced and abstract sequences of sounds that we hoped would reflect some of the features of the real-life musical phenomena we were trying to explore.
In the present day technological and conceptual advances allow us to surpass earlier research by running experiments on music in the wild. A real-world concert can become the focus of multiple research perspectives, here exploring: movement, gaze and autonomic processes in interacting performers: degrees of collective movement and engagement of audience members in respect of live and recorded performance; the potential influence of visual imagery on performance experience; and the legal, logistic and ecological problems posed in treating a concert as a nexus of research across multiple disciplines.
We are no longer limited to exploring the reductionist abstractions of forty years ago in using science to make sense of music. Science's capacity to encompass and predict the experiential grain of the material world seems to license it to claim epistemic priority over other ways of knowing. But even now science still tends to rely on reductionist methods; each of the experiments here constitutes an abstraction from the vagaries and messinesses of the events that transpire in the concert. The experiments are not being conducted on the "real thing" but on reduced versions that can be controlled and interrogated in order that they may yield data that can be analysed in a scientifically-acceptable way.
So why apply science at all in attempting to know music? Why not stay with conventional humanistic methods of exploring music, if relying on science gets us no closer to the "real thing"? We can suggest three reasons:
- methodological reductionism is not explanatory reductionism; just because our experiments use reduced versions of real-world phenomena does not mean that they cannot explain those real-world phenomena
- the sciences are not bodies of knowledge that take the form of absolute truths, but processes that offer the possibility of developing (albeit provisional) knowledge within ramified and connectable frames of understanding in ways inaccessible to humanistic approaches
- the application of multiple scientific approaches to an object of study allows us to triangulate our interpretations of it in ways that connect different perspectives for a richer understanding
Finally, when we explore music using scientific and humanistic frames of enquiry, it is important that we share what we do and do not know; we must share our uncertainties, which has to be key to unlocking any doors between the humanities and the sciences. The admission of what we do not know is every bit as important as is the proclamation of what we think we know and how we know it.
Ian Cross is Emeritus Professor of Music and Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Wolfson College. He has taught in the Faculty of Music since 1986, supervising numerous doctoral students and founding (and building) the Centre for Music & Science in 2002. His publications have had broad impact, his early work having helped set the agenda for the study of music cognition. He has since published widely in music and science, his research ranging across psychoacoustics, experimental archaeology, neuroscience, evolutionary theory and therapeutic applications of music. Recent research has involved testing a musical approach to enhancing perinatal mental health in an LMIC, The Gambia; evaluating ways in which conventional musical notation can be minimally adapted so as to make it easier to read at sight; and exploration of the ways in which common processes underpin music and speech as interactive media. He is Editor-in-Chief of the SAGE/SEMPRE Open Access journal Music & Science, a governor of the Music Therapy Charity, and a classical guitarist.
For more details see https://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/directory/ian-cross