Join us to the next seminar of the REM@KE Permanent Seminar Series with our second guest speaker, Jonathan De Souza, on Friday, March 27, starting at 17:00 CET.

Musical Instruments and Situated Cognition

Abstract:

When we learn to play a musical instrument, we also acquire certain ways of knowing music. For example, we learn to think like a pianist, violinist, or percussionist. This practical knowledge is fundamentally embodied and mediated by the instrument. Musicians’ knowledge, then, is always situated—historically, culturally, socially. But to what degree can we access musical knowledge from the past? Are we trapped in the present? In this presentation, I will approach such questions via philosophical work on temporal aspects of technology and technique, and music-theoretical work on the history of tonal hearing, which understands listening as a kind of situated cognition.

Recommended readings:

• Jonathan De Souza, Chapter one. Beethoven’s Prosthesis. Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition (Oxford University Press, 2017).
  Reading available upon registration to the seminar.

Invited speaker Bio:

Jonathan De Souza is an Associate Professor in the Don Wright Faculty of Music at the University of Western Ontario. He is the Director of the university’s Collaborative Specialization in Music Cognition, a Core Member of its Centre for Theory and Criticism, and an Associate Member of the Western Centre for Brain and Mind. His book, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition (Oxford University Press, 2017), received an Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music and the forthcoming Neurosciences of Music: Interdisciplinary Insights (Oxford University Press). Read more here: https://remake.unipv.it/persone/jonathan-de-souza/

Fill this form to register and join the seminar!