Music cognition and real-time listening: denotation, cue abstraction, route description and cognitive maps

摘要

This contribution is about music cognition in real-time listening. Starting from the distinction between knowledge-by-acquaintance as against conceptual knowledge, it argues for a definition of music listening as an ongoing process of sense-making that relies on epistemic interactions with the sounds. In order to provide a theoretical framework to assess this process of sense-making, it brings together conceptual and operational tools from the domains of deixis, cue abstraction, route-description and cognitive maps. Basically in this combined approach is the construction of knowledge as the result of ‘extraction’ and ‘abstraction’ of salient elements from the sonorous articulation through time. The latter can be continuous or discrete, but is possible to deal with them in a propositional way, relying on principles of cognitive economy rather than on the richness of full sensory experience.