Music and Emergence

John Carvalho writes about the music that emerges in a skilled engagement with an environment of sound. This music emerges in a piece of music when the embodied skills of a composer, performer, or listener enact affordances that turn up in the environment defined by that piece of music. For Carvalho, the imagination animates these skills and directs their embodied testing of the environment for affordances to be enacted in making music emerge in it. To support this argument, Carvalho turns to an ecology of mind and a taxonomy of listening that account for how composers, performers, and listeners enact the music in a piece of music.