Auriculture Fields Of Research

Philosony As A Discipline
Ontological and epistemological questions about what is music, sound, noise and listening: artefacts/structures or human processes?
What is listening cognition and understanding of noise/sound/music?
What is a musical experience? What is a noise experience?
What is the place of musical experience in traditional acoustical analysis?

Listening Analysis
Can traditional analysis be helpful in explaining listenable experience: tension or complementarity?
Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to listening.
Formal and informal analysis beyond the score: analysis by ear.
Cognitive maps and music.
Analysis and experience.
Analysis and validity: psychological and ecological reality of existing and future approaches of listening.

Noise, Sound And Music Semiotics
What is musical sense-making?Sense-making and signification: same or different?
Levels of listening sense-making and its correlations to noise, sound and music: syntactic level, semantic level, pragmatic level.
Semantics and hermeneutics.
Semantics and narrative.

Listening Semantics
Music as reference: self reference or extra-musical reference.
Program music/absolute music.
Sintagmatic referentiality in sound and noise.

Sound Pragmatics
Sound as felt, as experienced.
Sound and its inductive power.
Sociology of listening.
Music and entrainment.

Vocal Pragmatics
Voice as tool for communication (e.g. prosody, techniques, etc.).
Voice as tool for expression.
Voice and emotions.
Communicative and affective functions of human voice.

Intermediality Of Listening
Opera, musical, concert albums, song cycles, etc.
Text, performance, music.
Intermediality and communication: role of listener as target or actor.
Intermediality as persuasive instrument.
Attentional strategies: how to capture the attention of the non-schooled listener?
Soundart Intervention.

Listening And Time
Time consciousness and music.
Musical time and realtime.
In-time and out-of-time experience of music.
Perception, memory and imagination.

Listening As Experience
Listening as temporal art.
Music as sounding art.
Sensation, perception, cognition as applied to music.
Experience and cognition.
Embodied and enactive approach to music cognition.
Listening And Emotions
Chills and thrills.
Music and arousal.
Biological foundations of musical emotions.
Cognitive foundations of musical emotions.
Physiological aspects of musical emotions.

Biophony
Neurobiology of listening.
Physiological responses to listening.
Music/noise and the brain.
Music/noise and the hormone system.

Music As Sound
Impact of sound.
Spectrographic approach to music listening.
Music and overtones.
Music and resonance.
Music and drones.
Music and vibration.
Music and the body.
Music and movement.
Music and dance.
Action and perception, perception as simulated action.
Music and rhythmic entrainment.
Bodily resonance to music.
Music and trance.

Evolution Of Listening
Origins of music: why is there music?
Comparative approach: what are the functions given to listening and music all over the world.
Musical sense-making between nature and culture.
Listening instinct/faculty versus language instinct/faculty
Archeoethnomusicology.

Ecological Approach To Listening
Music as sounding environment.
Sound as listening environment.
Coping with the sounds.
Functional significance of sounds.
Musical affordances in sociological structures.
Listening and direct perception.

Listening Universals
Psychophysical commonalities.
Listening and psychobiology.
Universals of music/noise perception.
Universals of music/noise cognition.
Sound/music and Gestalt perception.
Auditory scene analysis.

Visualizing Listening
The musical score: limitations and possibilities.
Existing animation software: two-dimensional and three-dimensional.
Iconic versus symbolic approach.
Discrete versus continuous approach.
Spectrogram: limitations and possibilities.

Philosonic Research Commitments

 Competence 

1. Who  can make sounds/music, and who can interpret/use them? 

2.  What is  the  pattern of  musical acquisition and learning? 

3.  Are there stratifications of skill and knowledge? What types? How are they sanctioned, recognized, and maintained? 

4.  Is musical acquisition assumed to  be  unproblematic? A  necessity? 

5.  Do ideologies  of  "talent"  determine or  constrain acquisition and competence? 

6.  What is the relationship between competence, skill, and desire for music? 

7.  What are the differences between production and reception skills, for individuals, across social  groups? 

Form 

1. What are the  material musical means and how are they  organized into recognizable codes? 

2.  How  are musical means distributed across settings and participants? 

3.  What are the preferred aesthetic orderings? 

4.  What are the boundaries of perceived forms? What does it mean to be wrong, incorrect, or otherwise marginal from the standpoint of code flexibility and use? 

5.  How  flexible,  arbitrary, elastic,  adaptable, open is  musical form? How resistant to changes, internal or external pressures, or other historical forces? 

Performance 

1. What are the  relationships between makers and materials? 

2.  What is the relationship between individual and collective expressive forms and performance settings? 

3.  How are forms coordinated in performance? How adaptable and elastic is musical form when manipulated by different performers at a single moment in time or  over time? 

4.  How do cooperative and competitive social relations emerge in performance? 

What meanings do  these have for performers and audience? 

5.  How  do  performances achieve  pragmatic (evocative,  persuasive,  ma- 

nipulative) ends,  if  at  all? 

Environment 

1. What resources does the environment provide? How are they exploited'? What relationships exist between resources, exploitation, and the material means and social  occasions for performance? 

2.  Are there co-evolutionary patterns, ecological  and aesthetic, linking the environment and sound patterns, materials, situations'? 

3.  What are the visual-auditory-sensate relationships between people and environment, and how is this pattern related to expressive means and ends'? 

4.  What myths or models scaffold the perception of the environment? Are these related or  complimentary to  conceptions of  person, society,  expressive resources? 

5.  What mystical or cosmological associations with the environment support, contradict, or otherwise relate to the socioeconomic context of musical beliefs and occasions? 

Theory 

1.  What are the sources of authority, wisdom, and legitimacy about sounds and music? Who can know  about sound? 

2.  Is  musical knowledge public, private, ritual, esoteric? 

3.  What dimensions of musical thought are verbalized? Taught verbally? Non-verbally? 

4.  Is theory necessary? How  detached can theory be  from practice? What varieties of knowledge and activity count as musical or aesthetic theory'? How is  music rationalized? 

Value and Equality 

1. Who values and evaluates sounds'? Who can be valued and evaluated as a maker of  sounds? 

2.  How  are  expressive  resources distributed, specifically  among men and women,  young  and old? How do  stratifications emerge? 

3.  How do balances and imbalances manifest themselves in expressive ideology and performance? 

4.  Do  sounds deceive? Mystify? Who? Why? 

5.  Are sounds secret? Powerful? For whom? Why? 

6.  How  do  musical materials or performances mark or maintain social differences? How are such differences interpreted? How are they sustained? Broken or  ruptured? Accepted or  resisted?