Intellectual Knowledge Versus Experiential Awareness

Last week, I got email from a friend who made reference to the flaunting of an intellectually stunted brain. His comment reminded me that I needed to write the following post.

There's a fundamental difference between intellectual knowledge and experientially applicable awareness particularly when talking about making music (or “doing” anything for that matter).

My interest in the subjects I've chosen to focus on in the quest for understanding and building a better language to describe how people make music is not based on an intellectual fascination or to build a strictly intellectual knowledge base. To me, working with these subjects is the means to an end.

In the Western world the language we chose to use to teach people how to make music and how to think about making music is very poor and limited often inadvertently missing whole mental and physiological processes critical to cultivating the ability to create rich musical processes.

What's a rich musical process?

One that involves engagement of mind, body and spirit.

I don't expect the field of neuroscience to give instruction on how to make music based on it's findings and research. Nor do I expect an explanation of the spirit from cognitive psychology, physiology or biomechanics.

What I see is that there are particular musical processes that need to be recognized as extremely relevant in the teaching and understanding of how people make music. Neuroscience is starting to build a body of research that points to these processes and it’s time musicians, music educators and those designing musical tools and instruments started thinking about them and/or bringing them into more of the forefront of their work. We now have scientific evidence that they exist; there’s no excuse for ignoring them.