Books by Jonathan De Souza
From prehistoric bone flutes to pipe organs to digital synthesizers, instruments have been import... more From prehistoric bone flutes to pipe organs to digital synthesizers, instruments have been important to musical cultures around the world. Yet, how do instruments affect musical organization? And how might they influence players' bodies and minds?
Music at Hand explores these questions with a distinctive blend of music theory, psychology, and philosophy. Practicing an instrument, of course, builds bodily habits and skills. But it also develops connections between auditory and motor regions in a player's brain. These multi-sensory links are grounded in particular instrumental interfaces. They reflect the ways that an instrument converts action into sound, and the ways that it coordinates physical and tonal space. Ultimately, these connections can shape listening, improvisation, or composition. This means that pianos, guitars, horns, and bells are not simply tools for making notes. Such technologies, as creative prostheses, also open up possibilities for musical action, perception, and cognition.
Throughout the book, author Jonathan De Souza examines diverse musical case studies-from Beethoven to blues harmonica, from Bach to electronic music-introducing novel methods for the analysis of body-instrument interaction. A companion website supports these analytical discussions with audiovisual examples, including motion-capture videos and performances by the author. Written in lucid prose, Music at Hand offers substantive insights for music scholars, while remaining accessible to non-specialist readers. This wide-ranging book will engage music theorists and historians, ethnomusicologists, organologists, composers, and performers-but also psychologists, philosophers, media theorists, and anyone who is curious about how musical experience is embodied and conditioned by technology.
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Publications by Jonathan De Souza
Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen, edited by Björn Heile, Peter Elsdon, and Jenny Doctor, 2016
Audiovisual recordings of jazz performance often show musicians’ interactions with bandmates and ... more Audiovisual recordings of jazz performance often show musicians’ interactions with bandmates and audience members, yet they also document interactions with instruments. How does the sight of instruments—and the sight of instrumental performance—affect how the music is heard? As a case study, this chapter compares Pat Metheny’s audio recording Imaginary Day with its companion video, Imaginary Day Live. Drawing on theories of performativity, it argues that Metheny’s guitars visually cite genres like jazz, rock, and world music. By juxtaposing instruments, he performs a musical identity that is intentionally unstable. The chapter then considers how Metheny’s instruments affect his improvisations, with an analysis of his performances on a forty-two-string guitar. If aspects of Metheny’s music are visible as well as audible, then images of instruments may help constitute musical significance, both social and sounding.
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The Oxford Handbook of Concepts in Music Theory, 2015
This chapter considers musical texture as an emergent property. The first section shows how the i... more This chapter considers musical texture as an emergent property. The first section shows how the interplay of rhythm and pitch—specifically, degrees of synchrony and similar motion—produces basic textural categories (monophony, homophony, polyphony, and heterophony). These textural types may be transformed or hierarchically combined. The second section further argues that such textural structures are supplemented by textural materials, involving timbre, articulation, dynamics, and so forth. This focus on sound quality suggests a more “tactile” approach, imagining musical texture in terms of embodied performance and instrumental materiality. The third section explores texture’s interaction with large-scale form, musical metaphor, dramatic meaning, and social values. Throughout, the chapter mixes perceptual principles and theoretical formalization with analytical comments on diverse repertoire.
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Presentations by Jonathan De Souza
The philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote about using a hammer. While I’m busy hammering, I har... more The philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote about using a hammer. While I’m busy hammering, I hardly notice the tool. I’m more focused on “the work,” on whatever I’m doing with it. But if my hammer breaks, I stop and look at it. This thing demands my attention. If Heidegger were a musician, he might have chosen a piano instead of a hammer. While playing piano, I don’t think much about the keys. I’m more focused on the music. But if a key sticks or a note is out of tune, I’m suddenly made aware of the instrument’s materiality, its “thingness.” Some musicians create a similar kind of breakdown on purpose—by altering their instruments. Like Heidegger’s broken hammer, an instrument that has been retuned or prepared or redesigned can “get in the way.” It may surprise, resist, or provoke its player.
In this presentation I will discuss a few cases of instrumental alteration. I begin in the seventeenth century, examining retuned violin in the Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber. Then I look at two contemporary jazz guitarists: Kurt Rosenwinkel, who uses distinctive altered tunings, and Pat Metheny, who sometimes plays a redesigned guitar with forty-two strings. Through these examples, I will show how changes to an instrument relate to sonic organization and bodily technique. Yet drawing on theoretical work in grounded cognition, I will further argue that instrumental alteration affects players’ perception.
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Musical instruments afford bodily actions and sonic materials. Experimental research shows that s... more Musical instruments afford bodily actions and sonic materials. Experimental research shows that such affordances influence players’ perception. But how do instruments shape performance? This question suggests a technological determinism that affordance theory undermines, since objects may always be used in unexpected ways. Yet affordances depend on physical relationships between agent and object; they aren’t arbitrary or unlimited. This paper explores instrumental constraints through music-analytical and ethnographic investigation of harmonica music. It proposes a concept of “idiomaticity,” considering how affordances are interpreted through socio-cognitive frameworks.
Blowing through a harmonica’s holes gives a tonic triad; drawing air through the same holes gives the remaining notes of the major scale. Folk-harmonica players typically stay within this key. Blues players, however, approach these affordances in a way that the instrument’s ninteenth-century designers never anticipated, treating the in-breath notes as a Mixolydian tonic and bending notes. Bending is only possible with certain pitches, which colors the tonal idiom of blues-harmonica improvisation. More recently, some jazz harmonica players have developed an “overblowing” technique to play chromatically on the usually diatonic instrument. Analyzing solos by Bob Dylan, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Howard Levy, I show how these divergent styles reflect the harmonica’s sonic and physical affordances.
Their idiomaticity involves the coordination of this technological potential with individual and communal techniques. Just as affordances emerge at the nexus of organism and environment, instrumental idioms appear in the interplay of individual, object, and culture. This idea engages cognitive anthropology and philosophy: as Bernard Stiegler (2009, 185) writes, “the question of the idiom is that of the link between the who and the what.” A phenomenology of instrumental practice, then, ultimately raises ontological questions about the link between humanity and technics.
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Even after his hearing loss, Beethoven improvised on piano and violin. “His playing at such times... more Even after his hearing loss, Beethoven improvised on piano and violin. “His playing at such times,” reported a friend, “was more painful than agreeable to those who heard it.” But how might have Beethoven experienced this music—music that he could feel but not hear? My answer draws on music theory, cognitive psychology, and phenomenology, opening up to more general questions about experiences of instrumental performance. Recent research in cognitive psychology suggests that Beethoven’s actions would support sense-specific simulations of heard music. Moving his fingers on the keyboard or fingerboard would help bring sounds to mind. In this talk, I’ll review theories of grounded cognition that help explain this integration of sensorimotor skill and auditory imagination. I will then argue that such integration is shaped by musical instruments’ physical and sonic possibilities—what ecological psychology calls their “affordances.” In other words, I claim that musical instruments are not only tools for musical production; by constraining musicians’ actions and the resulting sounds, instruments also affect musical perception.
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In his Second Discourse, Rousseau imagines a double origin for humanity: natural man without soci... more In his Second Discourse, Rousseau imagines a double origin for humanity: natural man without society or technology was corrupted by a fall into artifice. Bernard Stiegler responds that the technical mediation arising from this second origin actually produced human temporality and culture. Extending Stiegler’s critique to Rousseau’s treatment of voice, this paper suggests that human vocality emerged alongside technology.
According to Rousseau the originary voice was an instinctual, emotional cry. The second origin transformed this natural voice through social conventions to create speech and song. Song retained affective power by imitating primal, passionate voices, but it became technicized through musical instruments that liberated melody from voice and created harmony, which “shackles melody” and “separates song from speech.” Rousseau’s musical polemics, then, recapitulate his anthropological speculations: singing has its own double origin where the natural voice was corrupted by instruments.
Like Stiegler, I put Rousseau into dialogue with paleoanthropologists—who argue that language co-evolved with tool-use. A common origin for technics, speech, and song indicates that the human ability to sing did not precede the ability to use instruments. This contextualizes Stiegler’s radical claim that there is no music without instruments, that the singing voice is always technically mediated.
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Audiovisual recordings of jazz performance often show musicians’ interactions with bandmates and ... more Audiovisual recordings of jazz performance often show musicians’ interactions with bandmates and audience members—but they also document musicians’ interactions with their instruments. This relation between musical bodies and musical tools, which is generally obscured in sound-only recordings, offers several insights. Instruments and instrumentalists both represent visual supplements to musical meaning; some aspects of their cultural significance may be seen but not heard. Yet the body–instrument interface does have sonic implications, as material conditions that simultaneously facilitate and constrain improvisation.
Pat Metheny, having performed on many different guitars, makes an interesting case study here. I begin by considering videos from throughout his career in iconographical terms. How do images of Metheny’s guitars and guitar-playing evoke traditions of jazz, rock, or world music? How do such images shape his work’s social resonance?
Then, I use videos to investigate audible consequences of Metheny’s instrumental innovations. He was, for example, one of the first jazz guitarists to perform on twelve-string, soprano, and baritone guitars, and he is a well-known proponent of guitar synthesizers. Though stylistic differences between these instruments may be distinguished by sound alone, I argue that they cannot be properly understood without watching Metheny play his guitars. As a demonstration, I analyse Metheny’s performance of ‘Into the Dream’ at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1999, a solo on a custom-built 42-string Pikasso guitar. This unusual piece of jazz emerges from techniques or performative strategies that are specific to this unusual instrument, which stretches the very definition of ‘guitar’. This dimension of Metheny’s music involves more than the notes alone: it equally engages sight and sound, as an essentially audiovisual phenomenon.
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Dissertation by Jonathan De Souza
This dissertation argues that instruments ground musicians’ experience. Instruments mediate perfo... more This dissertation argues that instruments ground musicians’ experience. Instruments mediate performers’ actions and the sounds they create. Yet I further claim that instruments affect perception and imagination. Practicing an instrument develops auditory-motor associations in the brain, which link action and effect, hand and ear. Such associations allow an instrument to withdraw from players’ awareness. Reactivated in various ways, they help shape musicians’ listening, improvisation, and composition. Finally, I claim that both performers and culturally situated listeners are sensitized to patterns of body–instrument interaction, as expressed in idiomatic schemas or instrumental topics. All of this shows that music cognition is not simply embodied; it is also conditioned by musical tools.
My musical illustrations are diverse—from Johann Sebastian Bach to Helmut Lachenmann, folk harmonica to contemporary jazz guitar. Here I consider instrumental interfaces as spaces for sound and action, which I formalize in transformational models of harmonica, fretboard, and fingerboard space. This analytical work, though, is informed by perspectives from ethnomusicology, music history, and organology.
The dissertation also incorporates two interdisciplinary strands. Empirical and theoretical work from grounded cognition—an approach that includes ecological psychology, distributed cognition, and neuroscience—illuminates dynamic relationships between body, mind, and world. Phenomenology explores our experiences of such relationships, in Martin Heidegger’s work on technology and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s on embodiment. Together these methods open up further questions, both experimental and philosophical, about the co-constitution of musical technologies and musical bodies, and the technical conditions of music itself.
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Papers by Jonathan De Souza
Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2023
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Books by Jonathan De Souza
Music at Hand explores these questions with a distinctive blend of music theory, psychology, and philosophy. Practicing an instrument, of course, builds bodily habits and skills. But it also develops connections between auditory and motor regions in a player's brain. These multi-sensory links are grounded in particular instrumental interfaces. They reflect the ways that an instrument converts action into sound, and the ways that it coordinates physical and tonal space. Ultimately, these connections can shape listening, improvisation, or composition. This means that pianos, guitars, horns, and bells are not simply tools for making notes. Such technologies, as creative prostheses, also open up possibilities for musical action, perception, and cognition.
Throughout the book, author Jonathan De Souza examines diverse musical case studies-from Beethoven to blues harmonica, from Bach to electronic music-introducing novel methods for the analysis of body-instrument interaction. A companion website supports these analytical discussions with audiovisual examples, including motion-capture videos and performances by the author. Written in lucid prose, Music at Hand offers substantive insights for music scholars, while remaining accessible to non-specialist readers. This wide-ranging book will engage music theorists and historians, ethnomusicologists, organologists, composers, and performers-but also psychologists, philosophers, media theorists, and anyone who is curious about how musical experience is embodied and conditioned by technology.
Publications by Jonathan De Souza
Presentations by Jonathan De Souza
In this presentation I will discuss a few cases of instrumental alteration. I begin in the seventeenth century, examining retuned violin in the Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber. Then I look at two contemporary jazz guitarists: Kurt Rosenwinkel, who uses distinctive altered tunings, and Pat Metheny, who sometimes plays a redesigned guitar with forty-two strings. Through these examples, I will show how changes to an instrument relate to sonic organization and bodily technique. Yet drawing on theoretical work in grounded cognition, I will further argue that instrumental alteration affects players’ perception.
Blowing through a harmonica’s holes gives a tonic triad; drawing air through the same holes gives the remaining notes of the major scale. Folk-harmonica players typically stay within this key. Blues players, however, approach these affordances in a way that the instrument’s ninteenth-century designers never anticipated, treating the in-breath notes as a Mixolydian tonic and bending notes. Bending is only possible with certain pitches, which colors the tonal idiom of blues-harmonica improvisation. More recently, some jazz harmonica players have developed an “overblowing” technique to play chromatically on the usually diatonic instrument. Analyzing solos by Bob Dylan, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Howard Levy, I show how these divergent styles reflect the harmonica’s sonic and physical affordances.
Their idiomaticity involves the coordination of this technological potential with individual and communal techniques. Just as affordances emerge at the nexus of organism and environment, instrumental idioms appear in the interplay of individual, object, and culture. This idea engages cognitive anthropology and philosophy: as Bernard Stiegler (2009, 185) writes, “the question of the idiom is that of the link between the who and the what.” A phenomenology of instrumental practice, then, ultimately raises ontological questions about the link between humanity and technics.
According to Rousseau the originary voice was an instinctual, emotional cry. The second origin transformed this natural voice through social conventions to create speech and song. Song retained affective power by imitating primal, passionate voices, but it became technicized through musical instruments that liberated melody from voice and created harmony, which “shackles melody” and “separates song from speech.” Rousseau’s musical polemics, then, recapitulate his anthropological speculations: singing has its own double origin where the natural voice was corrupted by instruments.
Like Stiegler, I put Rousseau into dialogue with paleoanthropologists—who argue that language co-evolved with tool-use. A common origin for technics, speech, and song indicates that the human ability to sing did not precede the ability to use instruments. This contextualizes Stiegler’s radical claim that there is no music without instruments, that the singing voice is always technically mediated.
Pat Metheny, having performed on many different guitars, makes an interesting case study here. I begin by considering videos from throughout his career in iconographical terms. How do images of Metheny’s guitars and guitar-playing evoke traditions of jazz, rock, or world music? How do such images shape his work’s social resonance?
Then, I use videos to investigate audible consequences of Metheny’s instrumental innovations. He was, for example, one of the first jazz guitarists to perform on twelve-string, soprano, and baritone guitars, and he is a well-known proponent of guitar synthesizers. Though stylistic differences between these instruments may be distinguished by sound alone, I argue that they cannot be properly understood without watching Metheny play his guitars. As a demonstration, I analyse Metheny’s performance of ‘Into the Dream’ at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1999, a solo on a custom-built 42-string Pikasso guitar. This unusual piece of jazz emerges from techniques or performative strategies that are specific to this unusual instrument, which stretches the very definition of ‘guitar’. This dimension of Metheny’s music involves more than the notes alone: it equally engages sight and sound, as an essentially audiovisual phenomenon.
Dissertation by Jonathan De Souza
My musical illustrations are diverse—from Johann Sebastian Bach to Helmut Lachenmann, folk harmonica to contemporary jazz guitar. Here I consider instrumental interfaces as spaces for sound and action, which I formalize in transformational models of harmonica, fretboard, and fingerboard space. This analytical work, though, is informed by perspectives from ethnomusicology, music history, and organology.
The dissertation also incorporates two interdisciplinary strands. Empirical and theoretical work from grounded cognition—an approach that includes ecological psychology, distributed cognition, and neuroscience—illuminates dynamic relationships between body, mind, and world. Phenomenology explores our experiences of such relationships, in Martin Heidegger’s work on technology and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s on embodiment. Together these methods open up further questions, both experimental and philosophical, about the co-constitution of musical technologies and musical bodies, and the technical conditions of music itself.
Papers by Jonathan De Souza
Music at Hand explores these questions with a distinctive blend of music theory, psychology, and philosophy. Practicing an instrument, of course, builds bodily habits and skills. But it also develops connections between auditory and motor regions in a player's brain. These multi-sensory links are grounded in particular instrumental interfaces. They reflect the ways that an instrument converts action into sound, and the ways that it coordinates physical and tonal space. Ultimately, these connections can shape listening, improvisation, or composition. This means that pianos, guitars, horns, and bells are not simply tools for making notes. Such technologies, as creative prostheses, also open up possibilities for musical action, perception, and cognition.
Throughout the book, author Jonathan De Souza examines diverse musical case studies-from Beethoven to blues harmonica, from Bach to electronic music-introducing novel methods for the analysis of body-instrument interaction. A companion website supports these analytical discussions with audiovisual examples, including motion-capture videos and performances by the author. Written in lucid prose, Music at Hand offers substantive insights for music scholars, while remaining accessible to non-specialist readers. This wide-ranging book will engage music theorists and historians, ethnomusicologists, organologists, composers, and performers-but also psychologists, philosophers, media theorists, and anyone who is curious about how musical experience is embodied and conditioned by technology.
In this presentation I will discuss a few cases of instrumental alteration. I begin in the seventeenth century, examining retuned violin in the Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber. Then I look at two contemporary jazz guitarists: Kurt Rosenwinkel, who uses distinctive altered tunings, and Pat Metheny, who sometimes plays a redesigned guitar with forty-two strings. Through these examples, I will show how changes to an instrument relate to sonic organization and bodily technique. Yet drawing on theoretical work in grounded cognition, I will further argue that instrumental alteration affects players’ perception.
Blowing through a harmonica’s holes gives a tonic triad; drawing air through the same holes gives the remaining notes of the major scale. Folk-harmonica players typically stay within this key. Blues players, however, approach these affordances in a way that the instrument’s ninteenth-century designers never anticipated, treating the in-breath notes as a Mixolydian tonic and bending notes. Bending is only possible with certain pitches, which colors the tonal idiom of blues-harmonica improvisation. More recently, some jazz harmonica players have developed an “overblowing” technique to play chromatically on the usually diatonic instrument. Analyzing solos by Bob Dylan, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Howard Levy, I show how these divergent styles reflect the harmonica’s sonic and physical affordances.
Their idiomaticity involves the coordination of this technological potential with individual and communal techniques. Just as affordances emerge at the nexus of organism and environment, instrumental idioms appear in the interplay of individual, object, and culture. This idea engages cognitive anthropology and philosophy: as Bernard Stiegler (2009, 185) writes, “the question of the idiom is that of the link between the who and the what.” A phenomenology of instrumental practice, then, ultimately raises ontological questions about the link between humanity and technics.
According to Rousseau the originary voice was an instinctual, emotional cry. The second origin transformed this natural voice through social conventions to create speech and song. Song retained affective power by imitating primal, passionate voices, but it became technicized through musical instruments that liberated melody from voice and created harmony, which “shackles melody” and “separates song from speech.” Rousseau’s musical polemics, then, recapitulate his anthropological speculations: singing has its own double origin where the natural voice was corrupted by instruments.
Like Stiegler, I put Rousseau into dialogue with paleoanthropologists—who argue that language co-evolved with tool-use. A common origin for technics, speech, and song indicates that the human ability to sing did not precede the ability to use instruments. This contextualizes Stiegler’s radical claim that there is no music without instruments, that the singing voice is always technically mediated.
Pat Metheny, having performed on many different guitars, makes an interesting case study here. I begin by considering videos from throughout his career in iconographical terms. How do images of Metheny’s guitars and guitar-playing evoke traditions of jazz, rock, or world music? How do such images shape his work’s social resonance?
Then, I use videos to investigate audible consequences of Metheny’s instrumental innovations. He was, for example, one of the first jazz guitarists to perform on twelve-string, soprano, and baritone guitars, and he is a well-known proponent of guitar synthesizers. Though stylistic differences between these instruments may be distinguished by sound alone, I argue that they cannot be properly understood without watching Metheny play his guitars. As a demonstration, I analyse Metheny’s performance of ‘Into the Dream’ at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1999, a solo on a custom-built 42-string Pikasso guitar. This unusual piece of jazz emerges from techniques or performative strategies that are specific to this unusual instrument, which stretches the very definition of ‘guitar’. This dimension of Metheny’s music involves more than the notes alone: it equally engages sight and sound, as an essentially audiovisual phenomenon.
My musical illustrations are diverse—from Johann Sebastian Bach to Helmut Lachenmann, folk harmonica to contemporary jazz guitar. Here I consider instrumental interfaces as spaces for sound and action, which I formalize in transformational models of harmonica, fretboard, and fingerboard space. This analytical work, though, is informed by perspectives from ethnomusicology, music history, and organology.
The dissertation also incorporates two interdisciplinary strands. Empirical and theoretical work from grounded cognition—an approach that includes ecological psychology, distributed cognition, and neuroscience—illuminates dynamic relationships between body, mind, and world. Phenomenology explores our experiences of such relationships, in Martin Heidegger’s work on technology and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s on embodiment. Together these methods open up further questions, both experimental and philosophical, about the co-constitution of musical technologies and musical bodies, and the technical conditions of music itself.