Does the body shape
the musical mind?
Center for the Epistemology of Cognitive Science
Introduction
The classical cognitivist picture of a symbol-
manipulating mind-brain has been
challenged recently by the so called
'embodied cognition program' (ECP).
According to the ECP,
'to say that cognition is embodied means
that it arises from bodily interactions with
the world' (Thelen, 2000, p. 4).
On this regard, the field of music cognition
is no exception. In reaction to highly
intellectualist, rule-based approaches to
music perception (e.g. Lerdahl &
Jackendoff, 1983), a growing number of
researchers have investigated the way
music perception relies on bodily activities
(e.g. Leman, 2007)
But it is not entirely clear how the ECP is
supposed to challenge the cognitivist view
of cognition. One major epistemological
question is whether the ECP is meant to
complement classical cognitive science, or
to replace it. Another concerns what
exactly is meant by the terms 'embodied' in
'embodied cognition'.
With these two questions in mind we shall
focus on the embodiment, if any, of metrical
structure perception.
Metrical Structure:
The Classical Account
One is said to understand a piece of music
only if one is able to assign a structure to
this bit of music. This structure is not
necessarily present in the physical signal,
so this assignment of structure has to be
attributed to a mental inference from the
signal.
Figure 1. Metrical Structure of the beginning of
the Mozart G Minor Symphony
Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) provide a
theory of metrical structure along the
following lines.
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The basic ingredient of the metrical
structure is the beat.
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The beats have to be equally spaced.
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However, a series of beats forms a
metrical structure only if there is a
distinction between strong and weak
beats.
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For beats to be strong or weak there
must exist a metrical hierarchy, that is
two or more levels of beats.
Pierre Saint-Germier,
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon,
pierre.saint-germier@ens-lyon.fr
So the basic question the cognitive scientist
has to answer is how metrical structures, so
defined, are to be assigned to a musical
surface.
To answer this question Lerdahl and
Jackendoff distinguish two kinds of rules,
well-formedness rules and preference rules.
Rules of the first kind define the set of
possible metric structures in the idiom
under investigation. When several well-
formed structures can equally be applied to
a musical surface, preference rules tell us
which structures are more likely to be
heard.
The ECP Challenge
In the cognitivist explanation, the body is
absent both from the explandum and the
explanans. The explanandum is described
in terms of mental inference and the
explanans is constituted by rules. So there
are at least two ways for the embodied
cognition theorist to challenge the
cognitivist explanation: reject the initial
description of the phenomenon in sole
terms of mental inference or reject the
explanation itself.
In the first case, you can say that the target
phenomenon is not only something mental,
but also, and perhaps foremost, something
that involves the body. But if you change
the explanandum along these lines, you
implicitly change your working definition of
what cognition is. So you presuppose what
you want to show. A much stronger way of
challenging the cognitivist is to take the
explanandum as she characterizes it and
show that her explanation won’t work
unless it refers to bodily events or
processes.
A series of studies by Jessica Philips-Silver
and Laurel J. Trainor (2005, 2007, 2008)
show that bodily events can help to
disambiguate the perception of ambiguous
rhythmic patters.
If the following pattern is played with no
physical accent,
there are two possible ways for the hearer
to understand its metrical structure, in duple
(fig. 2a) or in triple form (fig. 2b)
Figure 2a. Figure 2b.
This research was made with the financial support of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon
The hypothesis under investigation is that
bodily movements can help to disambiguate
the rhythm. Various experiments have been
designed to test it.
The first one (2005) was done with 7 month-
old infants. The infants were divided into
two groups. Those of the first group were
bounced up and down while held in the
arms of the experimenter on every second
beat. Those of the third group were
bounced on every third beat. Thus, both
groups heard the same stimulus, but had
different movement experiences.
Figure 3. Infant being bounced in rhythm
After training, preferences of the infants
were tested for an accented version of the
auditory stimulus in duple form versus an
accented version in triple form pattern.
Infants controlled how long they listened to
each version of the rhythm in a head turn
preference procedure. Now infants chose to
listen longer to the auditory test stimulus
with accented beats that matched the beats
on which they were bounced. Thus their
bouncing determined whether infants later
preferred the auditory rhythm pattern
congruent with duple or triple form.
This effect was then showed to be
independent from visual information, i.e. the
effect is still observed when the infants are
blindfolded. It was also shown that the
effect depends on the personal movement
of the infants. For the effect disappears if
the infants don’t move but simply watch the
experimenter move every second or third
beat.
This effect was then (2007) generalized to
adults, using the same experiment, except
that instead of being bounced, the adults
bounced themselves by bending their
knees, imitating the experimenter. At test,
they identified as similar an auditory version
of the rhythm pattern with accented strong
beats that matched their previous bouncing
experience in comparison with a version in
which the accents did not match. Similarly,
it was shown that the effect does not
depend on visual information but that bodily
movement is critical.
Does it succeed?
At first glance, it looks like we have a
powerful argument in favor of the ECP. In
our interpretation of the facts provided by
Philips-Silver and Trainor, it seems that
bodily events do play a cognitive role:
had the body been moving differently, the
stimulus would not have been heard the
same way. If you don't take the body into
account, then you miss a crucial part of
the determinants of the cognitive
processing. So without changing the
explanandum, the explanans must
include bodily events.
However, further studies par Trainor & al.
(2009) show that bodily events are not
mandatory for the effect. For the effect
can be produced without any actual
movement, but only with a direct galvanic
stimulation of the vestibular system. So
movement does not appear to be
constitutive of the effect, but only causally
related to it, via the vestibular system.
Thus the argument is more an argument
in favor of the cross-modal character of
metrical structure perception, i.e.
involving proprioception as well as
auditory perception, than an argument in
favor of its embodiedness.
Moreover, these facts are entirely
compatible with a 'Brainbound' model of
cognition, that is a model according to
which 'the non-neural body is just the
sensor and effector system of the brain'
(Clarke, 2008, p. xxvii).
References
Clark, 2008, Supersizing the Mind, Oxford:
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Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, 2005, How The Body Shapes the
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Mind, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Leman, 2007, Embodied music cognition and
mediation technology, Cambridge MA: The MIT
Press.
Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 1983, A Generative
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Theory of Tonal Music, Cambridge MA: The MIT
Press.
Phillips-Silver and Trainor, 2005, 'Feeling the
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Beat: Movement Influences Infant Rhythm
Perception', Science, Vol. 308, p. 1430.
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Phillips-Silver and Trainor, 2007, 'Hearing what
the body feels: Auditory encoding and rhythmic
movement', Cognition, Vol. 105, p. 533-546.
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Phillips-Silver and Trainor, 2008, 'Vestibular
influence on auditory metrical interpretation',
Brain and Cognition, Vol. 67, p. 94-102.
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Thelen, 2000, 'Grounded in the world:
Developmental origins of the embodied mind',
Infancy, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 3-28.
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Trainor & al., 2009, 'The primal role of the
vestibular system in determining musical rhythm',
Cortex, Vol. 45, p. 35-43.