The Musical Instrument as a Natural Extension of the Musician

Aims
This paper aims at gaining a theoretical understanding of the relationship between musician and musical instrument. Thorough knowledge of the nature and value of this relationship will reveal basic components of the embodied interaction during music performance. We develop a conceptual framework that provides an interdisciplinary theoretical basis for future in-depth studies related to ongoing empirical research (e.g. the EmcoMetteca project at IPEM, Ghent University).
Main Contribution
The main contribution of this paper is a refinement of the concept of musical embodiment in two ways. First, concepts from ecological philosophy, activity theory and presence research are used to identify different components of the music performance situation (e.g. musician, instrument, score, audience, room...) and to clarify their mutual interaction. Second, the study of a non-verbal (social and technology related) communication domain as a concrete example of embodied interaction will contribute to the refinement of philosophical concepts (such as the second-person perspective in music performance, the instrument as mediator, the coupling of action and perception).
The starting point of the presented research is a finding that is shared and intuitively apprehended by many musicians, namely the experience that the musical instrument has become part of the body. We support to the viewpoint that this awareness is a necessary condition for a fine-grained expressive communication of musical meaning.
In this paper it is argued that a symbiosis between musician and musical instrument results from a growing integration of instrumental and interpretative movements into a coherent whole that is compatible with the body of the musician and with the movement repertoire of daily life. Such integration leads to the transparency of the musical instrument that just like “natural” body parts disappears from consciousness. The musical instrument has then become part of the body as stable background of every human experience and is no longer an obstacle to an embodied interaction with the music. It has become a natural extension of the musician, thus allowing a spontaneous corporeal articulation of the music.
Implications
A further elaborated theoretical framework for embodied music cognition will give empirical research a firm ontological and epistemological ground. This is linked up with modern philosophical approaches that go beyond the Cartesian dualism. Research into embodied music cognition is of particularly interesting for the development of interactive multimedia platforms, music education, applications in rehabilitation and numerousof applications within the cultural and creative sector (e.g. for music gaming).