Enabling Embodied Analogies in Intelligent Music Systems

When human beings make or listen to music, they regularly draw on analogies to other forms of knowledge and embody how they feel through their own body. Research on interactive music systems has gradually shifted from “dialogue” between human and computer to information retrieval, thus posing the risk of commodifying and reifying the encounter with technology [1]. On the contrary, recent advances brought a dramatic increase in human-centered and reflexive retrieval and indexing methods based on subjective concepts such as emotion, preference and aesthetics [2]. Interestingly, recent studies on music cognition suggest that listeners are able to change their semantic relations with the sonic world through functional adaptation at the level of sensing, acting and coordinating between action and perception, in biological, psychological, and cultural terms that involve motor, kinesthetic, haptic and visual, besides the purely auditory components [3]. Implementing some understanding of how we feel and attribute meaning, when interacting with music technology, requires next-generation systems of interactive music, music intelligence and music information retrieval to operate in terms that can represent human cognition as multimodal and embodied.