Embodiment is the idea that our mental life, including musical subjectivity, depends directly on our body – its internal biological norms, and its patterns of activity in the environment – rather than just on the brain.
Research and theory on how we engage with, and make sense of, music is more than ever concerned with movements, gestures, sensorimotor couplings, and motor resonances. These are now recurrent themes in the music research community and are increasingly understood as features central to musical learning, emotion, development, perception, and performance, among others.
The centrality of body and action for human musicality has also promoted a debate for understanding the history and cultural diversity of musical subjectivity: how the rich interplay between embodied and social factors contribute to the development of musical styles and identities across different historical, geographical, and cultural contexts.
However, the real implications this framework can offer for our understanding of music and musicality remain unclear. What does it really mean for music cognition to be
embodied ?
CIM19 promotes interdisciplinary scholarship at the crossroads of musicology and other disciplines, and invites submission for analysis, critical reflection, experimental reports, and discussion of different aspects of embodiment in relation to music, from diverse epistemological standpoints.
Keynote speakers are:
Fred Cummins (University of Dublin, Ireland)
Renee Timmers (University of Sheffield, UK)
Invited speakers to date include:
Anthony Chemero (University of Cincinnati, USA)
Dylan van der Schyff (Oxford University, UK)
Conference topics include:
- The rol of action for musical meaning
- Music analysis, historical musicology, and musical subjectivity. Where is the body?
- The links between creativity, emotion, culture, and embodiment
- Religion, rituals, and joint music making
- Perception of musical sounds as embodied
- Dance and the phenomenology of music-related movements
- The body-mind problem in musical consciousness
- Embodiment in music philosophy and ethnomusicology
- Evo-devo debates and the embodied mind
- Implications for music technology
- Embodied cognition and the foundations of musical learning
Call for Papers
Submissions of abstracts for oral presentations will be accepted from the 1st of November 2018. If accepted, participants could choose between presenting in Graz, or remotely (e.g. via Skype). We encourage the latter should travel include flights. By explicitly addressing the conference theme “embodiment in music”, each submission must bring together and combine (aspects of) the following two broad areas:
1) Humanities, e.g., Philosophy, Linguistics, Phonetics and Phonology, Ethnology and Anthropology, Semiotics, Hermeneutics, Theology, Performance studies, Music theory, Composition, Archeology, Cultural studies, Literary studies, and Music history.
2) Sciences, e.g., Acoustics, Neurolinguistics, Neuromusicology, Biomusicology, Biology, Computing, Mathematics, Perception, Psychoacoustics, Empirical psychology and sociology, Statistics and computer science, Music therapy, and Cognitive science.
Abstracts should begin with a title and names and affiliations of the author(s). The main text should be structured with the following five headings:
- Background in X (first discipline, e.g., “Anthropology”)
- Background in Y (second discipline, e.g., “Instrumental performance”)
- Aims (this should be the shortest section)
- Main contribution (this should be the longest section)
- Implications for musicological interdisciplinarity
- References
The total length of each submission, including title, authors, headings and references, must not exceed 1000 words. Please do submit your proposals to andrea.schiavio@uni-graz.at(subject: abstract CIM19). Abstract submission deadline: 1st February 2019.
Registration will be open from May 2019.
Organizing Committee
Andrea Schiavio (University of Graz, Austria) – Chair
Richard Parncutt (University of Graz, Austria)
About CIM
CIM has its own society (the Society for Interdisciplinary Musicology) and its own international peer-reviewed journal (the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies). The best presentations at each CIM are invited for publication in a special issue of JIMS. Other presenters are invited to revise and submit their papers to JIMS for publication in a regular issue.
- CIM celebrates diversity. We aim to treat all musically relevant disciplines, all musicological subdisciplines and paradigms, and all music researchers equally.
- CIM promotes epistemologically distant collaborations. All contributions are encouraged to have at least two authors. The first two authors should preferably represent two of the following three groups: humanities, sciences, practically oriented disciplines.
- CIM focuses on quality rather than quantity and fosters intellectually rigorous debate. Academic standards are promoted by anonymous peer review of submitted abstracts by independent international experts in relevant (sub-) disciplines.
Funding
This conference is funded in part by a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship granted to AS by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): project number M2148.
4E Cognition Group 