Abstract: This article argues for an epistemology of music, stating that dealing with music can be considered as a process of knowledge acquisition. What really matters is not the representation of an ontological musical reality, but the generation of music knowledge as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world. Three major positions are brought together: the epistemological claims of Jean Piaget, the biological methodology of Jakob von Uexküll, and the constructivistic conceptions of Ernst von Glasersfeld, each ingstress the role of the music user rather than the music. Dealing with music, in this view, is not a matter of representation, but a process of semiotization of the sonorous environment as the outcome of interactions with the sound. Hence the role of enactive cognition and perceptual-motor interaction with the sonic environment. What is considered a central issue is the way how listeners as subjects experience their own phenomenal world or Umwelt, and how they can make sense out of their sonic environment. Umwelt-research, therefore, is highly relevant for music education in stressing the role of the listener and his/her listening strategies.

Key words: Keywords: Musical epistemology, music knowledge construction, biosemiotics, music semiotics, enactive cognition, Umwelt, functional cycle, von Uexküll.

This paper addresses the question whether we can conceive of music cognition in ecosemiotic terms. It claims that music knowledge must be generated as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world and calls forth a shift from a structural description of music as an artifact to a process-like approach to dealing with music. As listeners, we are observers who construct and organize our knowledge and bring with us our observational tools. What matters is not merely the sonic world in its objective qualities, but the world as perceived. In order to make these claims operational we can rely on the ecological concept of coping with the sonic world and the cybernetic concepts of artificial and adaptive devices. Listeners, on this view, are able to change their semantic relations with the sonic world through functional adaptations at the level of sensing, acting and coordinating between action and perception. This allows us to understand music in functional terms of what it affords to us and not merely in terms of its acoustic qualities. There are, however, degrees of freedom and constraints which shape the semiotization of the sonic world. As such we must consider the role of event perception and cognitive economy: listeners do not perceive the acoustical environment in terms of phenomenological descriptions but as ecological events.

Key words: adaptation and adaptive control, cognitive economy, coping behavior, ecosemiotics, enactive and experiential cognition, epistemic control system, event perception, listener–environment interaction, musical epistemology

Open peer commentary on the article “Music as Semiotic Eigenbehavior” by Douglas Walter Scott. Upshot: The aim of this commentary is to position Scott’s contribution within the broader framework of enactive cognition and dynamic systems and to explore its possible relation to the ecological and biosemiotics approach to music knowledge construction.

Is musical meaning reducible to knowledge of the structure of the music, and is this to be conveyed in logocentric or logogenic terms – assuming that its meaning is conducive to verbal description – or should we conceive of musical meaning in musicogenic terms, with music having properties that refer mainly to the music (Tagg, 2013)? Is music=structural knowledge to be equated with pre-existing concepts and labels that are assigned to the sonorous unfolding, or should we rely on moment-to-moment experience of the unfolding through time? It is the main distinction between the lexico-semantic and the experiential approach, which has its conceptual grounding in the discrete/continuous dichotomy. Much research on musical meaning has focused rather narrowly on the lexico-semantic dimensions of conceptualization, equating sense-making with a logocentric view on music cognition. It is the goal of this chapter to argue against this narrow view and to consider music knowledge construction from an enactive point of view. Revolving around perception-action loops and sensorimotor couplings, it offers a theoretical framework that is grounded in the concept of circularity between an organism and its environment in an attempt to provide a descriptive and explanatory theory in which the role of functional significance in knowledge construction is emphasized on the basis of deictic, enactive, ecological, and biosemiotic claims. Music knowledge construction, in this view, must go beyond a conception of passive information pickup in favor of a definition of the listener as an adaptive device that generates appropriate behavior in reaction to the continuous changes in its internal and external state. As such, it stresses the role of adaptive knowledge construction in a way that perception and action are linked in a continuous process of sense-making and interaction with the environment. These interactions can be manifest – as in processes of sensorimotor integration (such as playingn instrument or singing) – or virtual (with movements simulated merely at the level of imagery) with a gradual shift from presentational immediacy to symbolic representation of the sounds.