Inhabiting Sound: Tactile-sonic links in musical meaning

Connections can be suggested between music’s occupation of physical space, its relative ‘presence’ (using Edward Hall’s notion of proxemics), and the various senses of movement which pervade it. Movement might be seen to operate with respect to music at a variety of levels of metaphorisation – as increasingly complex chains of analogy which point back to our early physical experience of the world. But of course music is, fundamentally, action. Humans put energy into systems - external or internal to themselves - which transduce that energy into the movement of air. At the acoustic level music is, emphatically and unmetaphorically, movement. Perhaps such simple physical perceptions form one route through which we might understand and explore shared senses of meaning and their capacity for ‘transduction’ between multiple individuals. Our (developmentally) early sensory models of the world, built from encounters with its physical resistances and affordances, might be a route to understanding our more clearly encultured and abstracted ('higher' level) understandings of music.

Es teatro vuestra oración: Santa Teresa’s performed confession in Juan Mayorga’s La lengua en pedazos

Juan Mayorga’s La Lengua en Pedazos (2010) strikes at the heart of the compositional circumstances of St Teresa's Libro de la Vida– staging, and arguably heightening the origins of her rhetorical strategies, the sense of awareness of readership and potential censure we encounter within the Libro de la Vida. His inquisitor refuses to be complicit in the tacit agreement that the word spoken in the theatrical space can conjure new realities –insistent on underscoring the textual origin of the visions painfully and partially offered up for his and our scrutiny. I will suggest that the persistent undertow towards a meta-commentary on the unmaking and remaking of the autobiographical text creates an unresolved tension between Teresa’s eloquent ability to take the spectator to a place beyond language, and our awareness that we are in the presence of a consummate performer, the textual source for the script itself produced with a supreme awareness of audience scrutiny. The play reflects ongoing lines of inquiry in our evolving understanding of the cultural production of Teresa and other holy women of the Early Modern period.

Language Experience Affects Grouping of Musical Instrument Sounds

Language experience clearly affects the perception of speech, but little is known about whether these differences in perception extend to non-speech sounds. In this study, we investigated rhythmic perception of non-linguistic sounds in speakers of French and German using a grouping task, in which complexity (variability in sounds, presence of pauses) was manipulated. In this task, participants grouped sequences of auditory chimeras formed from musical instruments. These chimeras mimic the complexity of speech without being speech. We found that, while showing the same overall grouping preferences, the German speakers showed stronger biases than the French speakers in grouping complex sequences. Sound variability reduced all participants' biases, resulting in the French group showing no grouping preference for the most variable sequences, though this reduction was attenuated by musical experience. In sum, this study demonstrates that linguistic experience, musical experience, and complexity affect rhythmic grouping of non-linguistic sounds and suggests that experience with acoustic cues in a meaningful context (language or music) is necessary for developing a robust grouping preference that survives acoustic variability.