Music and Language: Thinking–Perception–Practice

Abstract

The article aims to shed light on some recent empirical neuroscience and psychology researches, which target music perception and cognition. The explosive growth of data collected and the measurement preciseness should correlate with the clarity of conclusions made on their basis. However, for the skilled music practitioners, such correlation is not obvious. The author propose a definition of the term musician, based on the concept of musical cognitive status. The purpose is to provide the adequate support and refinement of the experiment design procedures for the cross-disciplinary researches, dealing with selection of music stimuli material, conceptual theoretical foundations, and cultural-dependent cognitive backgrounds of the participants. The author considers that music cognition of performers is framed by the specific music idea, represented in the acoustically certain sound image, transformed to the appropriate gesture. This clear image is generated successfully when the performer has a clear artistic idea of musical sense and content. The specific types of perception determine the content-consuming habits. The degree of perceptual accessibility of sounding musical phenomena is also determined by the peculiarities of both musical and linguistic perception matrix, rooted in culture. In order to avoid the waste of research resources, author considers several investigation paths, coming from the methodology of philosophic anthropology, focused on the cultural and language-dependent dimension of music discourse.