Abstract
This paper proposes that intuitive technologies play a vital role in cognition and cultural reception. The case of music is considered in particular. The perceived temporality of contemporary technology is shown to be an artificial barrier to the acknowledgement of longer-term dynamics. The increased role of explanatory metaphors from technology is traced across various fields of study. Processes of sense-making—conscious or otherwise—are seen as an informal, unreflected repertory of mechanisms ranging from predictive models to instrumental metaphors. It is suggested that these derive by assimilation and induction from the technological milieu within which the subject develops and operates. The acquisition of these models and metaphors is itself an imaginative process, based on experience ranging from partial expertise to fantastical extrapolation.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
References
Agamben G (1999) The Man without Content. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Trans. Albert G
Arthur B (2009) The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. Allen Lane, London
Badiou A (2002) Ethics. Trans. Hallward P, Verso, London
Badiou A (2006) Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art. Polemics. Trans. Corcoran S. Verso, London, pp 133–148
Berardi F (2011) After the Future. AK Press, Oakland
Born G (2010) For a relational musicology: music and interdisciplinarity, beyond the practice turn. J Royal Music Assoc 135:205–243
Chalmers D (2006) Strong and Weak Emergence. In: Clayton P, Davies P (eds) The re-emergence of emergence: the emergentist hypothesis from science to religion. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 244–256
Channell D (2017) A history of technoscience. Routledge, Abingdon
Châtelet G (2000) Figuring space. Shore R, Zagha M. Springer Science, Dordrecht, Trans
Clark A (1998) Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation. In: Carruthers P, Boucher J (eds) Language and thought: interdisciplinary themes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 162–183
Dascal M (2002) Language as a cognitive technology. Int J Cognit Technol 1(1):35–61. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijct.1.1.04das
Davies SR, Halpern M, Horst M, Kirby DA, Lewenstein B (2019) Science stories as culture: experience, identity, narrative and emotion in public communication of science. J Sci Commun 18(05):A01. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.18050201
De Souza J (2017) Music at hand: instruments, bodies, and cognition. Oxford University Press, New York
Desmond K (2018) Music and the moderni, 1300–1350. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Dolan EI (2013) The orchestral revolution: haydn and the technologies of timbre. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Eaglestone R (2013) Contemporary fiction: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Forman P (2007) The primacy of science in modernity, of technology in postmodernity, and of ideology in the history of technology. Hist Technol 23(1):1–152
Frampton SE (2019) Empire of letters: writing in roman literature and thought from Lucretius to Ovid. Oxford University Press, New York
Frank M, Everett D, Fedorenko E, Gibson E (2008) Number as a cognitive technology: evidence from Piraha language and cognition. Cognition 108:819–824
Fukuyama F (2018) Identity: contemporary identity politics and the struggle for recognition. Profile Books, London
Gerstenberg T, Tenenbaum J B (2017). Intuitive theories. In: Waldmann M (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning. Oxford University Press, New York
Gibson W (2020) I was losing a sense of how weird the real world was. Interview with Sam Leith. The Guardian, London, 11. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was-losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was. Accessed 27 Nov 2020
Giddens A (1987) Social theory and modern sociology. Stanford University Press, Stanford
Goody J (1977) The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Goody J (1987) The interface between the written and the oral. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Goody J, Watt I (1963) The consequences of literacy. Comp Stud Soc Hist 5(3):304–345
Grier D (2005) When computers were human. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Haas C (1996) Writing technology: studies on the materiality of literacy. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah NJ
Hansson SO (2020) Technology and mathematics. Philosoph Technol 33:117–139
Hayles NK (2002) Writing machines. MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Hayles NK (2017) Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Heidegger M (1977) The Question Concerning Technology. In: Lovitt W (ed) and trans the question concerning technology and other Essays. Garland Publishing, New York, pp 3–35
Huron D (2006) Sweet anticipation: music and the psychology of expectation. MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Hutchins E (2010) Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things. In: Malafouris L, Renfrew C (eds) The cognitive life of things: Recasting the boundaries of the mind. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, pp 91–102
Ihde D (2009) Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. SUNY Press, Albany
Ihde D (2010) Heidegger’s technologies: postphenomenological perspectives. Fordham University Press, New York
Ingold T (2000) The perception of the environment. Routledge, London
Jankélèvitch V (2003) Music and the ineffable. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ
Kirschenbaum M (2016) Track changes: a literary history of word processing. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA
Kittler F (1999) Gramophone, film. Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, Typewriter
Lakoff G, Johnson M (1980) Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Malafouris L (2013) How things shape the mind: a theory of material culture. MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Maxwell JC (1890) The scientific papers of james clark maxwell:, vol 2. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
McCullough M (1997) Abstracting craft: the practiced digital hand. MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Mufwene S (2013) Language as Technology: Some questions that evolutionary linguistics should address. In: Lohndal T (ed) In Search of Universal Grammar: From Old Norse to Zoque. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 327–358
Mufwene S (2019) The evolution of language as technology: the cultural dimension. In: Love A, Wimsatt W (eds) Beyond the meme: development and structure in cultural evolution. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp 365–394
Mumford L (2010) Technics and civilization (1934). University of Chicago Press, Chicago
National Research Council (2002) Technically speaking: why all Americans need to know more about technology. Nat Acad Press Washington DC. https://doi.org/10.17226/10250
Nature: machine intelligence (2019) Return of cybernetics (editorial). Nat Mach Intell 1:385. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0100-x
Negri, Antonio (2011) Art and Multitude: Nine Letters on Art, Followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour. Translated by Ed Emery. Cambridge: Polity. Original edition, Art et multitude: Neuf lettres sur l’art suivies de Métamorphoses: Art et travail immatériel. Paris: Mille et une nuits
Noë A (2015) Strange tools: art and human nature. Hill and Wang, New York
Nordmann A, Bensaude-Vincent B, Loeve S, Schwarz A (2011) Science vs. Technoscience: a primer https://www.darmstadt.de/media/philosophie___goto/text_1/Primer_Science-Technoscience.pdf. Accessed 27 Nov 2020
Ong WJ (2002) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Routledge, London
Perez C (2002) Technological revolutions and financial capital: the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages. Elgar, London
Porter T (1995) Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity of science and public life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Postman N (1993) Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology. Vintage Books, New York
Preti G (1975) Scienza e tecnica. In: Dal Pra M (ed) Giulio preti: saggi filosofici, vol I. Empiricismo Logico. Epistemologia e Logica. La Nuova Italia, Florence, pp 437–448
Rosa H (2013) Social acceleration: a new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press, New York, Trans. Trejo-Mathys J
Rosa H (2019) Resonance. Polity Press, Cambridge
Schatzberg E (2018) Technology: critical history of a concept. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Simon H (1996) The sciences of the artificial. MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Skovmose O (2016) Mathematics: A Critical Rationality? In: Ernest P, Sriraman B, Ernest N (eds) Critical mathematics education: theory, praxis, and reality. Information Age Publishing, Charlotte NC, pp 1–22
Stiegler B (1998) Technics and time, 1: the fault of epimetheus. Beardsworth R, Collins G. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Trans
Stiegler B (2009) Technics and time 2: disorientation. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Trans. Barker S
Virno P (2015) Déjà Vu. Verso, London
Yasukawa K (1998) Looking at mathematics as technology: implications for numeracy. In: Gates P (ed) Mathematics education and society: an international conference. University of Nottingham, Centre for the Study of Mathematics Education, pp 351–359
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Impett, J. Music, discourse and intuitive technology. AI & Soc (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01126-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01126-4
Keywords
- Intuitive technology
- Metaphor
- Music
- Technics
- Temporality