{"title":"Emotion and the arts","authors":"Steven Brown","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"While many historical approaches equate the arts with aesthetics, I see the arts far more broadly than that. In addition, aesthetic emotions themselves need to be grounded in a general theory of human emotion. Along these lines, this chapter presents a communication model of emotion that covers the full gamut of processes from the production to the perception of emotion in the arts. The production side includes compositional processes for imbuing an artwork with emotions, as well as performance processes for conveying the emotions contained in an artwork. The perceptual mechanisms include recognition of the emotional content of an artwork, as well as the experience of felt emotions by people in response to such a work. The latter is where aesthetic emotions are situated in the model.","PeriodicalId":430158,"journal":{"name":"The Unification of the Arts","volume":"293 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124217050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The arts and their functions","authors":"Steven Brown","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"In asking the question ‘What is art?’, four major conceptions of a work of art can be considered: an object; an indicator of beauty; an indicator of craftsmanship or creativity; and a process of performance. This chapter contends that the two principal functions of the arts are re-creation and interpersonal coordination. Re-creation reflects the inherently narrative and symbolic function of the arts, as conveyed through storytelling, acting, narrative dance, and figurative forms of visual art. Interpersonal coordination—as seen in artforms such as dance and music—occurs in the three domains of time, physical space (dance), and tonal pitch space (music). A unified view of the arts reveals not only the cognitive similarities among artforms, but the widespread ability of artforms to combine with one another to form syntheses, as seen in songs with words and dances choreographed to music. A comparative analysis of the arts provides greater insight into each artform than is possible by looking at artforms in isolation.","PeriodicalId":430158,"journal":{"name":"The Unification of the Arts","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121689188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theatre and storytelling","authors":"Steven Brown","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The narrative arts deal with the presentation of stories via a variety of narrative processes and presentation media. Fictionality is a unique feature of the arts, one that distinguishes the narrative arts from the storytelling of everyday conversation. The plots of stories are grounded in the experientiality of the story’s protagonist in a storyworld, most especially his/her problem-solving dynamics. Literature describes these behaviours in the third person using narration, whereas theatre re-creates these actions in an embodied manner by having actors portray the characters in performance. While role playing is a central part of the presentation of the self in everyday social interactions, actors portray characters who they themselves are not, a re-creative process of impersonation and pretence that comprises the most art-specific feature of the narrative arts.","PeriodicalId":430158,"journal":{"name":"The Unification of the Arts","volume":"91 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120894836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dance","authors":"Steven Brown","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"The study of dance can be summed up as the four Ps: patterning, partnering, pacing, and person. Patterning is about the intra- and interpersonal processes used in creating complex movement patterns in space and time. Partnering in dance involves the coordinated movement of multiple dancers, generally in defined spatial configurations, sometimes occurring through direct body contact. Next, pacing in dance refers to the synchronization of movement patterns with both musical beats and interaction partners. Finally, the person aspect of dance deals with how dancers are able to engage in acting by portraying characters in narrative forms of dance and to tell stories with their bodies in a wordless manner using iconic and affective gestures.","PeriodicalId":430158,"journal":{"name":"The Unification of the Arts","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115048966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The visual arts","authors":"Steven Brown","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The visual arts, as compared to the performing arts, are defined by their static nature as fixed objects. However, visual art objects often have a ‘dual static/dynamic’ nature that allows them to convey a sense of both motion and emotion, especially when they depict human models. As a result, such objects appear to viewers as frozen snapshots of ongoing actions or gestures. The most art-specific process for the visual arts is the production of two-dimensional images. Compared with the production of three-dimensional objects, two-dimensional images require a dimensional reduction in order to create a flattened representation of a scene on a surface. Drawing is thus the ultimate visual arts activity.","PeriodicalId":430158,"journal":{"name":"The Unification of the Arts","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124813535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Music","authors":"Steven Brown","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"2The defining feature of music as a cognitive function is tonality (scale structure), since rhythmic structure is a shared feature with dance and poetry. In this chapter, the author develops a 4T (tonality/timing/texture/text) model of music, which views music as a suite of coordinative features in which rhythm provides time slots for interpersonal coordination and scale structure provides pitch slots for coordination. An important topic for the study of music’s evolution is its connection with both speech and language. Music and speech share a significant number of prosodic properties. However, a unique feature of music that is not found in speech is the process by which scale types are able to convey emotional meanings. Such scale/emotion associations allow music to modulate the interpretive meaning of narrative artforms, such as film, dance, and written texts (i.e. songs).","PeriodicalId":430158,"journal":{"name":"The Unification of the Arts","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115530752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creativity","authors":"Steven Brown","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864875.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"The study of creativity is about how people generate novel ideas and products, as opposed to reproducing or mimicking things that already exist. In this chapter, the author characterizes the study of creativity as the three Ms of mechanism, modulator, and meme. The mechanisms of creativity include the modification of existing products and the blending of two or more products to create stylistic fusions. Modulators of creativity include both individual-level factors (e.g. personality) and social factors (e.g. political constraints). The notion of a ‘meme’ reflects the cultural evolutionary concept that creative products either flourish or die out as a result of the critical reception they receive. A central question for the psychology of creativity is whether creativity depends more on domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms, or some combination of the two.","PeriodicalId":430158,"journal":{"name":"The Unification of the Arts","volume":"36 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120916697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evolution of the arts","authors":"Clifford Brown, T. Munro","doi":"10.2307/3048757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3048757","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines both the biological and cultural evolution of the arts. Biological evolution of the arts deals with how humans evolved the species-specific capacities to create and appreciate artworks, while cultural evolution is about how artworks themselves, as cultural products, undergo changes in persistence over historical time and geographic location. The study of biological evolution includes both phylogenetic (or historical) and adaptationist (or Darwinian) approaches. The study of cultural evolution of the arts reveals the importance of a ‘creativity/aesthetics cycle’ in which the products of human creativity get appraised for their level of appeal by the aesthetic system, allowing them to either be transmitted to future generations or die out. This unification of creativity and aesthetics has far-reaching implications for both fields of study.","PeriodicalId":430158,"journal":{"name":"The Unification of the Arts","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1970-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124013830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}