Musical Information Beyond Measurement and Computation: Interaction, Symbol Processing and the Dynamic Approach

Abstract

This chapter elaborates on the concepts of music information and information processing by bringing together the fields of computation, cybernetics and the dynamic systems approach. It conceives of music users as autonomous agents that behave as adaptive devices that construct their musical knowledge as the outcome of continuous epistemic interactions with the sonic world. As such, it challenges the classical symbolic-conceptual approach to musical information in terms of static, discrete and objective categories in favor of a trans-classical model that relies on subjective, process-like and non-discrete categories of meaning. In an attempt to go beyond traditional dichotomies, it proposes a hybrid perceptual-conceptual approach that does justice both to the richness and fullness of perceptual experience and the plasticity of mental operations in a kind of symbolic play.