A gray matter of taste: Sound perception, music cognition, and Baumgarten’s aesthetics

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Abstract

Music is an ancient and ubiquitous form of human expression. One important component for which music is sought after is its aesthetic value, whose appreciation has typically been associated with largely learned, culturally determined factors, such as education, exposure, and social pressure. However, neuroscientific evidence shows that the aesthetic response to music is often associated with automatic, physically- and biologically-grounded events, such as shivers, chills, increased heart rate, and motor synchronization, suggesting the existence of an underlying biological platform upon which contextual factors may act. Drawing on philosophical notions and neuroscientific evidence, I argue that, although there is no denying that social and cultural context play a substantial role in shaping the aesthetic response to music, these act upon largely universal, biological mechanisms involved with neural processing. I propose that the simultaneous presence of culturally-influenced and biologically-determined contributions to the aesthetic response to music epitomizes Baumgarten’s equation of sensory perception with taste. Taking the argument one step further, I suggest that the heavily embodied aesthetic response to music bridges the cleavage between the two discrepant meanings—the one referring to sensory perception, the other referring to judgments of taste—traditionally attributed to the word “aesthetics” in the sciences and the humanities.

Highlights

► The aesthetic appreciation of art depends on learned, culturally determined factors. ► The aesthetic response to music is associated with automatic, physical events. ► Coexistence of cultural and physical factors epitomizes Baumgarten’s theory of taste. ► Music reconciliates scientific and humanistic meanings of the word “aesthetics”.

Section snippets

The parameters of the debate

In June 2009, a team of archaeologists from the University of Tübingen led by Nicholas Conard reported the discovery of a largely complete flute and two small flute fragments in the oldest Aurignacian1 layer at Hohle Fels Cave, in southwestern Germany.

The aesthetic response between the beautiful and the sensory

The birth of “aesthetics” as the study of beauty in modern terms originates in the work of mid-eighteenth-century German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, who first articulated it as an autonomous field of philosophical inquiry concerned with the study of good and bad “taste”—thus of good and bad art. However, the original field of aesthetics—to which the contemporary medical meaning of the term still adheres—is not art, but sensory perception. The ancient Greek word aisthisis denotes the

Music between the physical and the intellectual

Edgard Varèse famously defined music as “organized sound”.13 Despite suffering from the easily challengeable assumption of “organization”14, Varèse’s formula succeeds in capturing the far less challengeable

Music and the beautiful

Arguably the most aesthetically rewarding and culturally valuable asset of music—and of art in general—is the ability to connect audiences by presenting ideas to which they can relate to in a universal way.

Music rescues the sensible

If the philosophical discourse on aesthetics has traditionally suffered from the “colonization of reason”, recent advances in neuroscientific research provide the opportunity to re-think the aesthetic response to music in terms of integrated, embodied mechanism, inextricably bound to both intellectual and biological dimensions. The recent discovery of mirror neurons, implicated in both action execution and observation (Di Pellegrino et al., 1992, Fadiga et al., 1995, Rizzolatti et al., 1996)

Conclusion

Kant famously stated “The intellect can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise”.47 The study of music reflects and grasps this epistemological multiplicity through a variety of disciplines, including acoustics, cognitive neuroscience, musicology, and ethnomusicology. If music as a whole is a primarily intuitive phenomenon, its core component—sound—is grounded on physical events. Clearly, the aesthetic

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges support by The Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America through the “Art & Neuroscience” Fellowship, and by Columbia University through the “Columbia Science Fellowship”. The author thanks Piotr Mirowski for feedback on the manuscript.

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