Hearing, seeing, and perceptual agency

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 34, Issue 2 SUPPL., 2008, Pages

  Monson, Ingrid ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52149123632     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/529089     Document Type: Review

References (57)

1. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2005), p. 47.
2. Jacques Derrida, "Différance," Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (1968; Chicago, 1982), p. 11.
3. David Howes, "Introduction: Empires of the Senses," in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (New York, 2005), p. 1.
4. See Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1994).
5. Charles Seeger, Studies in Musicology, 1935-1975 (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 23, 39, 47, 34.
6. I borrow Laura Ahearn's succinct definition from her "Language and Agency," Annual Review of Anthropology 30, no. 11 (2001): 112.
7. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977). My use of practice theory is informed by its usage in anthropology.
8. See Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 of Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago, 1991),
9. and Sherry B. Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston, 1996).
10. See Wayne Shorter, "Ping Pong," The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Art Blakey's 1960 Jazz Messengers (Mosaic Records MD6-141, 1961). Personnel: Lee Morgan, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Bobby Timmons, piano; Jymie Merritt, bass; Art Blakey, drums.
11. See Michael Silverstein, "Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function," in Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. John A. Lucy (New York, 1993), p. 47.
12. On music and metapragmatics, see Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago, 1996), pp. 185-91,
13. and R. Keith Sawyer, "The Semiotics of Improvisation: The Pragmatics of Musical and Verbal Performance," Semiotica 108, nos. 3-4 (1996): 269-306.
14. Reinier Plomp, The Intelligent Ear: On the Nature of Sound Perception (Mahwah, N. J. , 2002), p. 12.
15. See Richard M. Warren, Charles J. Obusek, and John M. Ackroff, "Auditory Induction: Perceptual Synthesis of Absent Sounds," Science, 9 June 1972, p. 1151;
16. Bregman argues that "music often tries to fool the auditory system" by manipulating "factors that control the formation of sequential and simultaneous streams" (Albert S. Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound [Cambridge, Mass. , 1990], pp. 457, 460).
17. Bottom-up (data-driven) processing refers to the input producing sensation; top-down (conceptually driven) processing refers to the conceptual process of interpreting the sensation. This is roughly equivalent to passive and active, or nonagentive and agentive, respectively, but it should be borne in mind that some top-down processes are also unconscious. See Plomp, The Intelligent Ear, pp. 1, 7, 34-37,
18. and Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis, pp. 17-19.
19. See Mitchell, Picture Theory. Mitchell discusses multistable images on pp. 45-48 and types of metapicture on pp. 56-57.
20. For a discussion of exclusive allocation, see Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis, p. 12.
21. For additional examples of multistable aural phenomena or illusions, see Diana Deutsch, The Psychology of Music (San Diego, 1999), pp. 299-348.
22. The classic essay on the development of musical notation, including its use of an iconic mode of pitch representation, is Leo Treitler, "The Early History of Music Writing in the West," Journal of the American Musicological Society 35, no. 2 (1982): 237-79.
23. Examples from this literature include Willie Anku, "Principles of Rhythmic Integration in African Drumming," Black Music Research Journal 17, no. 2 (1997): 211-38,
24. and David Locke and Abubakari Lunna, Drum Damba (White Cliffs Media WCM-9508, 1996).
25. See Kofi Agawu, African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective (Cambridge, 1995)
26. and "Representing African Music," Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 245-66.
27. See Locke, Drum Gahu: The Rhythms of West African Drumming (Crown Point, Ind. , 1987), pp. 7, 23.
28. See Locke, "Cubism in African Music Improvisation," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, 16-19 Nov. 2006. I thank Locke for sharing the yet-to-be-published manuscript of the article on which his talk was based.
29. See Vijay Iyer, "Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics" (Ph. D. diss. , University of California, Berkeley, 1998), pp. 24, 30-31, 101.
30. Iyer is now a very highly regarded jazz pianist and composer, whose activist musical artistry deserves attention in its own right. See www. vijay-iyer. com. For an earlier example of a cross-culturally oriented approach to music and cognition, see Elizabeth Tolbert, "Theories of Meaning and Music Cognition: An Ethnomusicological Approach," The World of Music 34, no. 3 (1992): 7-21.
31. See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice;
32. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, 1984);
33. Derrida, "Différance"
34. and Stephen Kosslyn and Olivier Koenig, Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience (New York, 1992).
35. Gerald M. Edelman, Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (New Haven, Conn. , 2004), pp. 106-7.
36. Edelman describes them as "degenerate," meaning that widely different neuronal groupings can carry out the same function or produce the same output. See Edelman, Wider Than the Sky, pp. 154, 174. The inverse is also true; the neuronal grouping can produce a variety of outcomes.
37. See Edelman, Wider Than the Sky, pp. 124-25.
38. See Lawrence H. Summers, "Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," 14 Jan. 2005, www. president. harvard. edu/speeches/2005/nber. html
39. For an account of genetic switching accessible to humanists, see James D. Watson and Andrew Berry, DNA: The Secret of Life (New York, 2003), pp. 209-10, 224-27.
40. Susan Oyama, "The Problem of Change," in Brain Development and Cognition: A Reader, ed. Mark H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass. , 1993), pp. 26, 25. I thank Stephen Kosslyn for sending me this article.
41. See Watson, DNA, pp. 201-2.
42. I attempted to bridge this gap in my Saying Something, pp. 207-9, by speaking of a discursivity in music that is phenomenal.
43. See Thomas Turino, "Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music," Ethnomusicology 43, no. 2 (1999): 232-34.
44. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, Mass. , 1996), pp. 129, 123-44.
45. See Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994).
46. Judith O. Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington, Ind. , 2004), pp. 111, 118-19.
47. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), p. 276.
48. Dennis Overbye, "Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't," New York Times, 2 Jan. 2007, p. F1.
49. Maureen Dowd, "Monkey on a Tiger," New York Times, 6 Jan. 2007, p. A15.
50. Oyama, "The Problem of Change," p. 21.
51. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? p. 335.
52. Neba Solo and Yacouba Traoré, interview with author, 12 Jan. 2005, Sikasso, Mali.
53. Neba Solo, interview with author, 16 Feb. 2006, Sikasso, Mali.
54. Neba Solo Group, Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, 10 Nov. 2005. Personnel: Neba Solo, bass bala; Siaka Traoré, treble bala; Yacouba Traoré, karinyan; Lamissa Traoré, tchatchara; Mahamadou Traoré, drum set; Zatien Gonsogo, low bara drum; Oumar Coulibaly, high bara drum; Idrissa Dembele, traditional violin; Bocary Dembele, dancer; Ibrahim Dembele, dancer.
55. For additional information and musical examples, see www. nebasolo. net
56. Howes, "Introduction," p. 4.
57. See Jonah Lehrer, "Hearts and Minds," Boston Globe, 29 Apr. 2007, pp. E1, E3.