The human science of music certainly seems to be a hot topic right now. The publication in quick succession of Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, has brought discussions of the nature of music cognition and its medical and neuro-physical manifestations to a wide audience, and has reminded us, if we needed reminding, that music in all its forms and consequences is one of the central issues in human life. Both these books, together with Levitin’s more recent The World in Six Songs, take the embodied nature of musical activity for granted, at least in their parallel fascination with the workings of the human brain, in sickness or in health. However, most of the more specialist investigations into music cognition to date have come from another ethos, where cognition is viewed as a more abstracted attempt to get at the logical systems ‘behind’ the human involvement with music, and frequently to test them through implementations in computer software. In his important and comprehensive book The Musical Mind: The cognitive psychology of music, John Sloboda puts it like this,

For some time now, both cognitive science per se and its philosophical underpinnings have been undergoing a big change, with a number of challenges to this viewpoint taking a more physicalist, embodied approach. Thus it is good to see Marc Leman in his most recent book, Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, taking on these developments and applying their insights to issues of music cognition. The main focus of the book is one highly practical issue: how can we deal with the wealth of digitally encoded music now available to us in efficient and intuitive ways? This is clearly a matter of import to the iPod and mobile phone generation, and to the growing industrial base intent on delivering music to us in a manner engaging enough to thwart illegal downloading. In order to deal with this issue, Leman embarks on a wide-ranging discussion of many of the thorny problems of traditional music cognition, from the perspective of an embodied notion of the human mind.

This discussion is clearly aimed at scholars, students and researchers, and its interdisciplinary ambition is stated in the preface, where Leman includes in his audience readers ‘with backgrounds in musicology, philosophy, engineering, physics, psychology, and neuroscience’ (p. xi). With an eye to the breadth of the readership here, Leman cautions that the book is ‘more a philosophical essay about the foundations of music research and a journey into possibilities rather than a survey of … empirical research results …’ (p. xi). I suspect the philosophical stuff and the journey into new possibilities are what we really want to read, but there are also some substantial discussions of experimental data from a number of key empirical studies. These provide the sort of insights that ground the more theoretical moments of the book, and they also allow us to test the experimental methods in operation against the requirements of the philosophical and speculative discussion. The enterprise of a ‘philosophical essay’ implies certain aims and ambitions, and I think one has to take the term ‘philosophical’ here in a particular spirit; one which acknowledges the breadth of the ground plan and insights of this book, but which also points to some of its weaknesses.

Leman prepares the ground with a comprehensive and perceptive overview of some of the basic concepts, issues and research ambitions of the field of music cognition. The chapters on ‘Musical Experience and Signification’ and ‘Paradigms of Music Research’ give a clear and engaging introduction to the novice, but also to the expert since the discussion in these chapters is rooted in a specific issue of mediation, framed immediately inside a very practical and contemporary design problem: how does one ‘find and retrieve the music one really wants to purchase’? Or, more broadly, what would it be to have a ‘transparent mediation technology that relates musical involvement directly to sound energy’? (p. 1)This framing of the discussion allows Leman the means to get through a lot of material in a clear, succinct and engaging fashion, but it also encourages what seems to me to be the book’s main drawback, an overly reductionist and constraining view of what we mean by ‘technology’. Arnold Pacey, in his book Meaning in Technology, proposes that machines and technologies are, at their root, ways ‘to interpret the world and give it meaning’ (Pacey Reference Pacey1999: 17). Leman is clearly aware of this turn of thought, and chapter one contains a veritable checklist of perspectives on the formation of meaning in music, but not on the ways technologies themselves are implicated in this meaning formation. The issue is there in the undercurrents of the discussion, but somehow it never surfaces to disturb the instrumental conviction that a sufficiently clever technology can somehow bridge ‘the gap between musical mind and matter’ that ‘signification practice’ can somehow be improved by new developments in philosophy or cognitive science to deliver better results – whatever those might be. This seems to be where the ‘philosophical’ approach falters a little, not in the range of the discussion, which is admirable, but in the depth of consideration of the main elements of the argument: mediation, ecology, technology, meaning and so on. These terms have been the subject of so much fruitful contention and elucidation that it seems a pity that they figure so economically in Leman’s thesis.

The real heart of the book is in the two middle chapters, ‘Corporeal Articulations and Intentionality’ and ‘Interaction with Musical Instruments’. Here the general idea is that human actions can be conceived of as mediating between mind and matter. Thus gaining a better understanding of this mediation process is of crucial importance for the development of a technology, or technologies, which will assist people in their interactions with the ‘matter’ of digitally encoded music. In some respects this makes sense, and provides a useful discursive background to such recent actual developments as the Nike+ physical activity data connection to the iPod, or the Musinaut system, which aims to provide physiologically appropriate background music to your daily cycle of moods and situations (http://www.musinaut.com). It also stands as the practical outcome of Leman’s core assertion ‘that musical communication is based on the sharing of neural structures that pertain to movement’ (p. 161).

The argument Leman builds for this idea is clear and compelling, as is his view of its potential practical implications. However, the lightness of meaning in the terms of the discussion delivers what seems like another round of instrumental reductionism, and when we hear that this thesis ‘forms the power of music as a universal language’ we must wonder where all the discussions of ecology, sociological meaning formation and corporeal imitation actually got us. This is a pity since many of the difficulties that Leman points to in the long-term project of music-technology research – the development of meaningful tactile feedback in performance interfaces, for instance – would seem to stand a better chance of getting somewhere if the real insights of the philosophical discussions so far were properly brought into play (see for example Pierre Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer1971).

The final chapter is an account of Leman’s own research into search and retrieval systems for digitally encoded music. This is a fascinating case study, and Leman’s technique of multi-modal querying – where linguistic, audio and physical items of information are combined to provide a search interface – forms a good synthesis and exemplar of the main themes of the book.

This book is clearly compulsory reading for anyone concerned with music cognition or music technology. It has all the right topics in its sights, and it lays out the field of research with exemplary clarity and engaging style and focus. Its deficiencies, though they are at the heart of the discussion, have been a feature of thinking about music technology for most of that discipline’s existence. There is clearly work still to do here, but Marc Leman’s contribution certainly pushes in the right direction.