This research on the musical act tries to understand how artistic activity and musical intelligence function in their plasticity through practice, learning, and oral/aural creativity, as well as how a social group establishes organizational rules and frameworks for designing particular music.
Orality is a constituent process that can condition and create improvised and spontaneous forms, whether musical or poetic (Lortat-Jacob). The immense musical terrain represented by the Mediterranean basin is a fascinating example of the transfer of cultural elements, but also of the construction of specific identities. The understanding of its mechanisms, involving processes of exchange, interaction, imitation, memorization, reproduction, implies the construction of a comprehensive anthropology of the phenomenon of listening, for which a thorough knowledge of the cognitive aspects, in the relationship that oral music establishes with memory, is essential (Chouvel).
Field investigations and psychological experiments focus mainly on the role of acculturation and the implication of cognitive patterns in listening to the listener, as well as the complex relationships of the creator (improviser, performer) to music, to common culture (the art of emotional bonding, During), and to the norms of tradition; i.e. how, and on what criteria, could the improviser be the bearer of a particular gift for the social group, and have a specific link with what is out of the ordinary and common? We are also interested in the experience and the semantic depth of everything the musician can say about his/her social practice and his/her art; diverse verbalizations, metaphorical formulations, symbolic representations, etc. It is the aesthetic experiences of the subjectactors and the performative and cognitive strategies that are acted upon that hold our attention. These are all cultural and psychological references to be collected in the field of performance, to be analyzed and reported in our .culturalized listening model..
IRCAM's Team : Sound Perception and Design
