Extended musicking, extended mind, extended agency. Notes on the third wave

Kevin Ryan*, Andrea Schiavio

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The conceptual resources of ‘4E’ music cognition – i.e. the embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive paradigms – have offered a rich set of tools to explore the nature of musical experience. Among these four approaches, the extended mind perspective has heretofore received less overall attention. In this paper we focus on further developing the musically extended mind - especially in regards to musical performance - drawing on recent third wave developments. After exploring the main tenets of first wave (parity between internal and external components), second wave (complementarity between internal and external components), and third wave (dynamically changing internal and external components, as well as extended and decentralized agency) accounts of the extended mind, we turn to introducing existent first and second wave positions on music cognition. While they offer important insights, we suggest that elements of the third wave, especially focused on decentralized agency, are needed to capture the complexities of musical performance. We apply the third wave tools to the case of music performance in order to show, first, the specific limitations of the first two waves focus on parity and complementarity and, second, how a third wave account may be developed by applying it within this particular context.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)8-17
Number of pages10
JournalNew Ideas in Psychology
Volume55
Early online date24 Apr 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2019

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We would like to thank Shaun Gallagher and Richard Parncutt for comments and suggestions that improved our original draft. We would also like to thank the audience at the University of Memphis PGSA Brown Bag Series, as well as the editor and two anonymous reviewers for additional feedback. A.S. is supported by a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship granted by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) : project number M2148 .

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd

Keywords

  • Extended mind
  • Music cognition
  • Music emotion
  • Music performance
  • Musicking

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