This text was written for the festschrift for the symposium on 6 September 2024 celebrating Marc Leman’s achievements as professor of Ghent University and marking his retirement.

In his seminal book Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, Marc Leman (2008) drew up a theoretical framework that has influenced a whole new generation of researchers, myself included. Building on a long tradition of systematic musicology, combined with ecological psychology and modern technology, he convincingly set the direction for a fresh approach to scientific studies of musical experiences. In the following, I will reflect on some concepts raised in his discussion and also point out some that he did not address completely, but that have been left for others, like myself, to explore in more details.

Musicology

I have known Marc Leman for more than two decades, initially through the connections between him and my supervisor, mentor, and later colleague, Professor Rolf Inge Godøy. Although there are some differences in approaches between Leman’s research group at Ghent University (centred around Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM)) and University of Oslo (centred around the fourMs Lab, currently part of RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion), we share the same theoretical foundations and empirical approaches, and have contributed to a similar line of research throughout the years.

The collaboration and intellectual exchange between our groups has been made possible through joint participation in several COST Actions, and a series of summer schools (The International Summer School in Systematic and Comparative Musicology) organised in Ghent several times before it moved to Jyväskylä and Hamburg. At the summer schools, I recall that Marc Leman always insisted on the importance of naming our discipline musicology. He several times asked the rhetorical question “Who stole musicology?”, which he also wrote about in an article discussing the future of music research (Leman 2008). His argument was that the number of researchers studying music, in one way or another, has increased dramatically over the last years. That is even more true today than it was back then. Just looking at the citation indexes from Google’s journal rankings show that the majority of music-related publications and citations are in engineering, computer science, therapy, psyhology, or education. One could argue that perhaps only five of the 20 listed publication “channels” (using this word since a couple of them are conference proceedings and not journals): Musicae Scientiae (#5), Journal of New Music Research (#11), Music & Science (#13), Popular Music and Society (#18), Music Theory Online (#20). This is a simplification, because there may be some people identifying as musicologists publishing in the other top-ranked channels, and there are certainly people that do not identify as musicologists within the five highlighted ones. Yet, Leman’s (and now my) argument is that only a small percentage of everyone studying music today identifies as a musicologist.

Even though I have studied musicology and work in a department of musicology, I have been among the many researchers that have not felt entirely comfortable with the term. After spending some years at North American universities in the early 2000s, I constantly had to explain why my music technology-oriented research should be characterized as musicology. As outlined already by Joseph Kerman (1985) in his book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, the term musicology has taken on different meanings in Europe and North America. I quickly noticed this when I began my studies at University of California, Berkeley, where I found that the musicologists only study classical music history. At the University of Oslo, I was used to musicology studies that included performance and composition in addition to both social and natural science approaches to the study of music. At Berkeley, like many other places in the US, musicologists studied the history and reception of classical music, music theorists did analysis and composition, again, mainly of a classical music reportoire, and ethnomusicologists did the “rest”. I never felt at home in this division, but thrived at the Centre for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), where the late Professor David Wessel encouraged research at the crossroads of music psychology and technology and bridging artistic and scientific methods.

In Europe, the term musicology has been used more broadly, often prefixed with “historical”, “systematic”, and “comparative”. However, as discussed by Albrecht Schneider (2018), things quickly become complex when tracing the field(s)’ developments throughout history. As opposed to many other disciplines, the only thing that musicologists at large have in common may be the fact that we all study music in one way or another. The challenge today is that more and more people study music, with an increasingly large array of methods and theoretical entry points, but few of these people call themselves musicologists. It seems like the term “music science” appeals more to those using experimental methods and statistics in their research than “systematic musicology”. Practiotioners entering into research, including various types of artistic research, appear to be more at ease with using the term “music research”. This is also the term I have preferred myself, saying that I am both a music researcher and research musician, to highlight that I work with both scientific and artistic methods to produce both scientific and artistic results.

More recently, however, I have been inspired by Marc Leman’s focus on etymology. Musicology literally means the study of music (music-o-logy). The word does not impose any limitations to what type of music one studies or how one studies it, it is a catch-all word. Perhaps we have focused too much on defining what it means and which subdisciplines it includes (and does not include)? Might that be a reason for its lack of appeal? By softening up and inviting more people to the family, there may be more people feeling at home in calling themselves musicologists in the future.

A techno-cognitive approach

My book Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments (Jensenius 2022) is a theoretical music technology book. It can in many was be seen as a continuation of some of the reasoning in Leman’s Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology although there are many differences. My entry point is from embodied music cognition, building on Leman’s theory. My main focus, however, is that of musical instruments, an often neglected study object within musicology. Instruments are central to music performance, yet remarkably little attention is devoted to discussing what instruments are, how they look, work, and are perceived. Organology—the study of musical instruments—has been a marginal subdiscipline of systematic musicology, and a topic that not even music students know much about.

Traditional musical instruments are often neglected because they are seen as objects that you buy, perform with, and put on the shelf. Today, most traditional musical instrument development is done either by the big manufacturers producing for worldwide sale or by sole luthiers hand-crafting exclusive instruments for experts. Both of these are quite disconnected from higher education and academic research institutions.

Experimental musical instruments, on the other hand, are often developed at universities, typically by people like myself that often self-identify as “music technologists”, another ill-defined term that few people know what entails. Many of us develop new instruments not because we aim for the instruments to go into production, but because it helps us understand more about musical experiences. This is what I call a “techno-cognitive” approach. We can learn much about human cognition by prototyping new instruments that in various ways play with our senses. And we can use knowledge about embodied music cognition in the development of new instruments. Here the “logies” of “music”, “techno” and “psycho” play together.

Musicking technology

Leman has used the term “mediation technology” to describe various digital systems that can support musical exploration. I prefer the term “musicking technology”. This plays on the term “to music”, getting away from thinking about music as an “object” but instead acknowledging that music is something you do (Small 1998). This is particularly important when looking at new musical instruments, which often have very different qualities than the traditional ones.

As I describe in my book, traditional (acoustic) instruments are built around action–sound couplings, defined by the interactions of sound-producing objects. It is the mechanical and acoustical properties of the objects involved that define the resultant sound. This gives each instrument (drum, violin, piano, etc.) their unique visual and auditory character and a well-defined set of (sonic) affordances that are well-known to both performers and perceivers.

Things become much more complicated once we look at various types of electro-acoustic instruments. I prefer this term above “digital musical instruments” because even though there may be some digital components in an instrument, it produces acoustic sound through some kind of electronic device. Electro-acoustic instruments are built around action–sound mappings, relationships between input actions and resultant sounds that have been designed. Action–sound mappings, as opposed to couplings, are not based (purely) on the physical layout of a device or the interaction of vibrating objects. Instead, mappings may be designed in computer code and rendered through a speaker. The result is a series of new instruments that can produce any sound you like. That is both good and bad. It opens for a lot of new sounds to be made, spurring creativity. However, it can be confusing to perceivers since they do not know what sound to expect when seeing someone perform on a device.

New musicking technologies also allow for various types of “active listening” devices. The D-Jogger developed at IPEM (Moens 2018), is one such device, adjusting the tempo of the music to the user’s running speed. I would call it musicking technology as it encourages musical engagement. I would even call it a musical instrument in the user has control over the musical output. Of course, performing on D-Jogger is different from playing the piano, but it is still a type of active and embodied musical activity. It is an example of how modern technology can improve people’s lives, or empower people through music (Leman 2016).

As Marc Leman is now entering a new stage in his long career, I am grateful for his many contributions throughout many decades. I will continue to build on his theories and be inspired by his wisdom for many years to come.

Myself and Marc Leman at the 2024 symposium

References

  • Jensenius, A. R. (2022). Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Kerman, J. (1985). Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Leman, M. (2008a). Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Leman, M. (2008b). Systematic musicology at the crossroads of modern music research. In A. Schneider (Ed.), Systematic and Comparative Musicology: Concepts, Methods, Findings. Hamburger Jahrbuch Für Musikwissenschaft, Volume 24, pp. 89–115. Vienna: Peter Lang.
  • Leman, M. (2016). The Expressive Moment: How Interaction (with Music) Shapes Human Empowerment. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Moens, B. (2018). D-Jogger: An Interactive Music System for Gait Synchronisation with Applications for Sports and Rehabilitation. Ph.D. diss., Ghent University.
  • Schneider, A. (2018). Systematic Musicology: A Historical Interdisciplinary Perspective. In R. Bader (Ed.), Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology, pp. 1–24. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Music/Culture. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.