Author:

Keywords:

real-time listening, perceptual experience, phoronomy, deixis

Abstract:

Music has been studied traditionally as a static structure, representing the music at a symbolic level without any connection to its sounding qualities. Musical sense-making as a perceptual experience, however, reflects the sonorous articulation 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. Starting from theoretical groundings and empirical findings, this contribution argues for an enactive approach to real-time listening by mentally tracing the sonorous unfolding in a virtual space. Revolving around the conceptual framework of deixis, which locates things or events in context by mentally pointing to them, it refers to the referential exchange between the listener, considered as a (moving) origo, and the music. The act of pointing can be focal or extended in time, as exemplified in the gestural approach to musical sense-making. An attempt is made to elaborate on this gestural analogy by introducing the idea of phoronomy, which emphasizes the act of mentally tracing a geometric form, and by bringing it in relation with the morphodynamical approach by Schaeffer and Smalley, as a conceptual tool for the description of the experience of continuity. In order to maximize these opportunities, however, there is need of analytical tools for visualizing both the music as a distributed substrate and the mental tracings of the listener. Much is to be expected here from spectrograms with continuous and analog annotation tools that highlight the pointing gestures of the listeners, both in an automatic and listener-driven way.