Abstract
This paper addresses the question whether we can conceive of
music cognition in ecosemiotic terms. It claims that music knowledge must be
generated as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world and calls forth a shift from a
structural description of music as an artifact to a process-like approach to
dealing with music. As listeners, we are observers who construct and organize
our knowledge and bring with us our observational tools. What matters is not
merely the sonic world in its objective qualities, but the world as perceived. In
order to make these claims operational we can rely on the ecological concept of
coping with the sonic world and the cybernetic concepts of artificial and
adaptive devices. Listeners, on this view, are able to change their semantic
relations with the sonic world through functional adaptations at the level of
sensing, acting and coordinating between action and perception. This allows us
to understand music in functional terms of what it affords to us and not merely
in terms of its acoustic qualities. There are, however, degrees of freedom and
constraints which shape the semiotization of the sonic world. As such we must
consider the role of event perception and cognitive economy: listeners do not
perceive the acoustical environment in terms of phenomenological descriptions
but as ecological events.