U.C. Santa Cruz: DMA/Ph.D. programs in Music;

MFA program in Digital Arts and New Media

 

Music 251-I

Digital Arts and New Media 251-I

Empirical Approaches to Art Information

(this syllabus is still in progress!)

 

Ben Carson, Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory

email:  blc@ucsc.edu         phone: x9-5581

office hours: Mondays and Wednesdays 11:00-12:30p, or by appointment

 

Tuesdays, 1:00-4:00p in Music Center 136

DANM course number 43889

MUSIC course number 43890

 

Catalog Course Description: 

Reading and practice in empirical methods, as applied to the study of music, visual art, multimedia production, and performance arts. Students apply existing knowledge in the cognitive sciences to a developing creative project, or develop and conduct new experiments. Discussion and reading topics include semiotics, critiques of empiricism, cultural determinants and contingents of perception, the psychophysics of information, sensory perception (visual and auditory), memory, pattern recognition, and awareness.

 

Readings:

Readings fall into two categories.  The first is "empirical," and primarily in the psychological literature on information processing, with an emphasis on sensory perception, memory, invariance, and problems in (auditory or visual) "scene analysis."  For these readings our goals are an exploration of established knowledge in the domain of human information processing, and a familiarity with basic elements of the ways in which that knowledge is established.  In the second category are theoretical readings that consider the limits of "scientific practices" in relation to other kinds of knowledge and practice.

 

Projects:

Participants in the seminar will be asked to operate on their own and in groups, toward the mastery of the concepts in the curriculum. The primary constitution of the seminar work is the presentation and discussion of the seminar readings, which will be accomplished each week with the help of participant-designed visual aids and, where possible, examples of 'art materials' demonstrating or challenging the aspects of the course. 

 

Each participant will also complete a final project in consultation with the instructor, which will either

(1) integrate aspects of her seminar presentations (about every two weeks, or twice in three weeks) with her "ongoing" creative work (not necessarily arising from the seminar itself), OR

(2) design and execute an empirical test that potentially refines or refutes existing knowledge on human information processing in the arts. 

Those engaged in empirical testing projects may collaborate with those engaged in creative work, and vice versa. In both types of project, students will be expected to document the relationship between their practical accomplishments and the concepts and ideas of the course conversation.

 

WEEKLY PROCEDURE:

 

Participants will divide the readings into roughly two categories each week. In any week, students will form two reading groups; each responsible to read one category with strict scrutiny, oriented toward formal discussion, while reading the other only for basic comprehension.  Groups will decide on presentation responsibilities within their category for each meeting.

 

When presentations are made, members of the presenter's reading group will engage in active dialogue about differing impressions of the text, while members of the other reading group adapt a more marginal stance to the conversation. At the conclusion of each presentation, we'll reverse that dynamic, so that "outsiders" to the text (i.e. members of the other reading group) will have the chance to provide a contrasted and potentially refreshed version of the dialogue produced by the first group's "close reading."

 

This procedure is unusual, but it has the effect of insuring that dialogue is enriched by multiple perspectives; in particular, it is meant to resist the tendency of specialized knowledge to produce specialized, inaccessible conversations; the texts you know intimately will be the ones you are obliged to convey to those whose sphere of interest is somewhat remote.

 

READINGS:

 

Weeks 1-3          EMPIRICISM in PERCEPTION and COGNITION                

Intermodernia 1:                   John Locke's 'Of Ideas in General and their Original', from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

 

1.              Steven K. Reed (2000), "Introduction: The Information Processing Approach," in Cognition. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 4-15.

2.              Jason W. Brown (1999), "On Aesthetic Perception," in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 6 No. 6/7 (June/July).

3.              Alan Costal and Arthur Still (1991), "Cognitivism as an approach to cognition" in Against Cognitivism: Alternative Foundations for Cognitive Psychology, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

4.              Arthur Still (1991), "Mechanism and Romanticism: A Selective History" in Against Cognitivism: Alternative Foundations for Cognitive Psychology, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 7-26.

 

***

 

5.              Exerprt from William James (1912), "A World of Pure Experience," from Essays in Radical Empricism. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 39-66.

6.              Gallagher, Shawn (2000). Phenomenological and experimental research on embodied experience.  Online:  http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/paris2000.html#1. [ Presented at Atelier phenomenologie et cognition. PhŽnomŽnologie et Cognition Research Group

CREA. Paris (December 2000).]

7.              Eric Clarke (2004). "Empircal Methods in the Study of Performance," in Empirical Musicology. New York: Oxford. 77-102.

 

Weeks 3-4           PSYCHOPHYSICS and PSYCHOMETRICS

Intermodernia 2:                   Excerpt of David Hume's "Of Scepticism with Regard to the Senses" in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Excerpt of Gilles Deleuze's (1953) "The Problem of Knowledge and the Problem of Ethics," from Empiricism and Subjectivity: Essays on Humes Theory of Human Nature, translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University, 1991.

Hermann von Helmholtz, "Concerning the Perceptions in General" in Physiological Optics (1866).

 

1.              Excerpt from S. S. Stevens (1951). "Mathematics, measurement, and psychophysics." In S. S. Stevens (ed.), Handbook of experimental psychology, pp 1-49. New York: Wiley, publishers.

2.              Paul Velleman and Leland Wilkinson (1993), "Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, and Ratio Typologies are Misleading," revised from The American Statistician 47:1.

3.              Chapters 1-3 of Paul Feyerabend (1988), Against Method. London/New York: Verso. 23-46.

 

***

 

4.              Stephen M. Kosslyn and Amy L. Sussman, Amy(1995), "Roles of Imagery in Perception: Or, There Is No Such Thing as Immaculate Perception" in The Cognitive Neurosciences, ed. by Michael Gazzaniga (series), Emilio Bizzi (section), Cambridge: MIT.

5.              James Gibson (1979), "The Animal and the Environment" from The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 7-15.

 

Weeks 5-6           ATTENTION, MOTION and TEMPORALITY

Intermodernia 3:                   William James' (1910) "Percept and Concept," in Some Problems of Philosophy.

 

1.              James Gibson (1979), "Experiments on the Perception of Motion in the World and Movement of the Self" from The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 170-188.

2.              Nelson Cowan (1995), "Introduction: modeling memory and attention," in Attention and Memory: An Integrated Framework. New York, Oxford. 3-32.

3.              Stephen McAdams and Daniel Matzkin (2001), "Similarity and Invariance and Musical Variation." In Biological Foundations of Music, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 2001 930: 62-76.

 

***

 

4.              George Sperling (1960), "The information available in brief visual presentations," in Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 74:11, 1-29.

5.              Bertram Scharf (1998), "Auditory Attention: The Psychoacoustical Approach," in Harold Pasher, ed. Attention, Sussex: Psychology Press. 75-117.

 

Weeks 6-7           VISUAL and ACOUSTIC SPACES

Intermodernia 4:                   Excerpt of Henri Bergson's (1911) "Summary and Conclusion," in Matter and Memory,  translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer.  London: George Allen and Unwin (1911): 299-332. Online:

http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~lward/Bergson/Bergson_1911b/Bergson_1911_05.html

 

1.             Stephen E. Palmer (1992), "Reference Frames in the Perception of Spatial

Structure," in Cognition, Information Processing, and Psychophysics: Basic Issues, Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 141-174.

2.              Julian Hochberg (1994), "Perceptual Theory and Visual Cognition" in Cognitive

Approaches to Human Perception, Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 269-289.

3.              Stephen McAdams (1989), "Psychological Constraints on Form-bearing

Dimensions of Music." In Contemporary Music Review 4, (Winter): 181-198.

 

***

 

4.              Andrew Gregory (1994), "Timbre and Auditory Streaming."  Music Perception 12:2, 161-174.

5.              Hasan GŸrkan Tekman (1995), "Cue Trading in the Perception of Rhythmic Structure," Music Perception 13:1, 17-38.

 

 

Weeks 7-8    MEMORY and EMOTION

Intermodernia 5:                   Augustine's "What It Is to Have Reminiscence" in Confessions, (397-8).

 

1.              John Kihlstrom, Shelagh Mulvaney, Betsy Tobias, and Irene Tobis (i.v.), "The Emotional Unconscious" in Cognition and Emotion, 30-87.

2.              AndrŽ Riotte, "Models and Metaphors" in Contemporary Music Review 4 (Winter): 373-380.

 

***

 

3.              Torben Grodal, "Melodrama, Lyrics, and Automatic Response," in Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.     

4.              Tan, Ed S. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Tr. by Barbara Fasting. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996.

5.              Gregory Curie (2004), "Cognitive Film Theory" from Arts and Minds, Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press.

 

 

BOOKS on RESERVE (starting December 4, 2006)

 

Eich, Eric, and John Kihlstrom, Gordon H. Bower, Joseph P. Forgas, Paula M. Niedenthal, eds.  Cognition and Emotion.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Still, Arthur, and Alan Costall, eds.  Against Cognitivism: Alternative Foundations for Cognitive Psychology.  New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Geissler, Hans-Georg, and Stephen W. Link, James T. Townsend, eds. Cognition, Information Processing, and Psychophysics: Basic Issues.  Scientific Psychology Series, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates, 1992.

Soledad Ballesteros, ed. Cognitive Approaches to Human Perception.  Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates, 1994.

Anderson, Joseph D. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

Dowling, W. Jay, and Dane L. Harwood. Music Cognition. San Diego: Academic Press, 1986.

Grodal, Torben. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford: Clarendon  Press, 1997.