Embodied Experience, Feelings and Music Education

Yesterday, after my after school drum set class I walked one of my drummers across the street to the elementary school where his mom works so he could get a ride home. 

On our way over we were talking about drumming and lots of other things and he described how he practiced at home. 

" I don't have a drum set at home so I use my sofa. One cushion is the hi-hat and one cushion is the snare and its weird but if you listen hard enough you can kind of hear them, like they sound like a hi-hat and snare" 

We then talked about audiation as we headed down the driveway to the elementary school and how musicians often can hear sounds internally the same way most people have an internal monologue. 

"They've got an internal voice and we've got that PLUS an internal vocabulary of sounds. Musicians has a bunch of secret powers but this is one of the coolest ones. Anywhere you are you can have a drumset. You can create the music in your head, write new songs, practice grooves that only you can hear but they are just as real to you.  Thats why when you're playing the sofa you can hear the drumset." 

It was really neat to have a student explain their experience of audiation and practice to me especially as I've been thinking about how composition, intention, and execution are intimately interrelated with our experiences in our bodies. 

I've been listening to this book on the way to and from work about embodied music cognition. Essentially how we experience the world and specifically music as an interrelation between our bodies and the world around us. 

This morning, on the way into school, the book started talking about Mimetic Motor Images (imagined movements but not acted movements) and Subvocalizations (the internal reading voice/understanding voice that allows for "hearing" a written word). 

These internal systems take our experiences of movement and speech and allow us to use them to understand motion/experience and words spoken and read. 

When I wiggle my lips and pass air through my voicebox i get this word. This set of symbols add up to the sound of that word. I develop that understanding and then I can think the word as a sound/concept/image all at once just by looking at the word and engaging my brain's mimetic systems of understanding. 

These systems take our lexicon of experiences and allow them to be translated into internal imagined actions and words that facilitate manipulation and combination as well as comprehension and development of meaning. 

I started thinking about Audiation as a tonal/timbral form of internal voice. It’s the use of our collected MUSICAL EXPERIENCES as the vocabulary that makes up our internal musical lexicon. This student Loves the drums. He is very highly engaged when playing. He is developing a focused vocabulary of internalized body movement and sound associations.  

It made me think about our musical superpower as a kind of kinesthetic audiation/subvocalization. 

My student's hearing of his hi-hat and snare sofa cushions was a kind of extension of internal voice. Instead of the physical moment being one of lips, vocal cords and lungs that resulted in a sound or a word it was an extension of arm, a completeness of stroke that created a distinct sound in his mind. 

He could "hit the snare" anywhere because he'd developed the internalized mimetic understanding of the motion and the resulting sound.

[This understanding  is also the foundation of the  process for understanding written music. You see the symbols add up to a motion that produces the  intentional sound-meaning the same way the letters add up to the word to a word-meaning]

It struck me that this kind of thing happens as an unconscious product of our experiences and learning. 

We develop these understandings and imaginings as an outgrowth of our experiences. They come to us through use and repetition and we can use them to make sense of physical action or even to understand meaning.

How then can we develop this vocabulary of musical thought in a way that it can be brought out in composition? 

There is a theory called Linguistic Determinism that is founded on the idea that the language you speak can limit and determine knowledge or thought.  Essentially the ways in which you make sense of the world through you language creates a filter to your ability to conceptualize or create meaning. It makes it impossible to separate your own thinking from the borders imposed on you through the frame of your mother tongue. (I'm not super familiar with this so I might be wrong) 

I wonder if when it comes to composition that the mother tongue of our musical lexicon- our own musically embodied experiences- is a limiter on our expression and comfort with composition. 

My student has an internalized sense of the sound and role of the drums, he has a facility with the instrument both in his head and in his hands. I have no doubt that if I were to ask this student to "play a feeling" like " play something sad/intense/spooky" he would be able to come up with a musical framework because of his internal and external familiarity with the mode of musical communication .

I wonder how we can create these kinds of useful musical experiences in order to create connections for students so that they can use their own internal embodied musical images as manipulatable material for composition. 

Build in the translation of intent into execution through development of embodied experience. 

I think this is the way that Rock bands do it. They see the rock bands they love, they mimic them, they develop the internal schema for their own intention and then externalize that through their own composition. 

I think it was Keith Richards that said  something like " we didn't set out to play rock and roll, we were trying to play like muddy waters and we just couldn't do it right" 

I think students do this in their listening. They understand the emotion and the embodied feeling of their listening choices, otherwise "Driver's License" wouldn't be a smash hit. 

I think the gap might be in the embodied physical actions needed to create musical sounds and the connection of those sounds to emotional states. 

Why does the scene in Waynes World where they all sing and air guitar along to Bohemian Rhapsody hit so hard for almost everyone? 

We understand the feeling in the bodies of the characters and we understand the feeling of the music AND we all have the experience of singing along with songs. 

We have all the pieces to understand the emotion and experience because we have the physical sensation as an embodied mimetic image.

To bring it back to my student. I think the students like this young drummer who are most successful and bridge the gap between musical sound and self expression in a way that contributes to their sense of self make this connection early. They feel the feeling of music quickly and they solidify it through repetition that they find rewarding BECAUSE of that connection. 

Those connections between physical motion+sound+ expression are important because they are the crux of communication through music and that developing those things is going to create better and more meaningful engagement and more successful students. 

Continuing questions:

How do you remember connecting sound and feeling in your own learning process?
What kinds of exploration do you do in your own life?
What kinds of embodied cognition do you see in your own experience?
Do you agree that “when it comes to composition that the mother tongue of our musical lexicon- our own musically embodied experiences- is a limiter on our expression and comfort with composition.”?
In what ways do our experiences empower or limit us to communicate?