Ontology of Music

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

The solo has been a crucial element of jazz throughout this tradition’s development. Unaccompanied solo works by single-line instruments, however, have a more recent lineage. Saxophonist/composer Anthony Braxton’s 1968 "For Alto" was the first full-length album of unaccompanied solos. The 1970s brought a plethora of solo recordings from an ever-increasing number of artists, many in the vanguard stream of the music.This aesthetic development brought with it a number of issues to consider. In the absence of a score or standardized repertoire, as is often the case in this genre, what gives a composition its identity? What are the ontological implications of music that deviates from cyclical harmonic structures and the theme-and-variations format? This article examines aspects of these issues through a close look at both the unique compositional processes of trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon, and his unaccompanied solo trumpet piece, “Webern.” Based on extensive interviews with Dixon, I explore three performances of Dixon’s composition, none of which sonically resemble one another. If the sounding result of a composition is not its central identity, how does one examine or define such a work? The problems in locating an essence or “center” of non-notated music, and how to analyze and represent it, are not specific to Dixon’s work, they are major issues that have limited the amount of scholarship that has focused on this approach to music-making.

This article argues against a widespread view that links musical Platonism and Aristotelianism with opposite ways of individuating musical works. This view assumes that Platonism is bound to individuate works of music in sonicist and noncontextualist terms, while Aristotelianism is tied to instrumentalist and contextualist accounts on work-individuation. I argue that this assumption is wrong. I provide an argument that shows that the differences between musical Platonism and Aristotelianism concern the existence conditions of musical works qua types, but not their identity conditions. Assuming that the existence and individuation conditions of types are given by their associated properties, I defend that the disagreement between Platonism and Aristotelianism is about the principle of instantiation of properties, regardless if these properties are monadic (sonicism and noncontextualism) or relational (instrumentalism and contextualism).

Chapitre 3 de "Improvisation, Culture, Audiotactilité". Il s'agit d'une analyse musicale et phénoménologique des deux versions jazz enregistrées par le trio Django Reinhardt, Eddie South, Stéphane Grappelli en 1937, du Concerto pour deux violons et orchestre en ré mineur BWV 1043 de J.S. Bach. L'analyse est basée sur la théorie de la musique audiotactile et a été réalisée au moyen de la complète transcription en notation musicale, publiée dans le livre, des deux enregistrements.

This article explores the ontological nature of musical versions. I assume the widespread view that type/token ontologies offer the best explanation of the repeatable nature of works of music. However, I show that traditional type/token theories, which distinguish only between two levels of objects, face two problems when applied to the phenomenon of musical versions. First, they are not able to accommodate the familiar intuition of our musical practices that the work versioned is repeated in its versions' performances. Second, they are not able to distinguish between two different phenomena of our practices: the phenomenon of a work's versions and the phenomenon of works inspired by, or derived from, other works. These undesirable consequences are entailed, under traditional two-level type/token theories, by the nature of types as ontologically thin entities. I defend that the hypothesis of nested types, a multiple-level type/token theory, can avoid these two problems while preserving the theoretical virtues of traditional two-level type/token theories and structural monism-the most widely shared view about the individuation of musical works, according to which musical works are individuated by one, and only one, sound structure.

In 1972, David Tudor composed Untitled, a seminal work of live-electronic music in which modular electronic components are hooked up to form feedback loops in order to generate sounds without exterior input. Tudor’s innovative approach has exercised a wide influence on the later development of noise music, and has been hailed as the precursor of the current trend of “no-input feedback” in electronic music. However, the nature of Untitled is shrouded in enigma. The configuration diagram of components employs peculiar symbols of Tudor’s own design, obstructing a straightforward identification of instruments. More critically, Tudor’s description of the piece as “part of a never-ending series of discovered works” calls into question the very delineation of Untitled as a standalone “work.” A subsequent remark that “all versions are performed live,” furthers the mystery—is Untitled a part of a series, or a series in itself? Resorting to its performance history only adds more layers of confusion. Despite his aim to perform everything live, the proliferation of components forced Tudor to record the output of an initial set-up in advance and use this as input source to a simplified configuration in performance. In 1975, Tudor created Toneburst, set to Merce Cunningham’s Sounddance, which used the same no-input principle without resorting to recorded sources. Shortly before his death, Tudor revived Toneburst for other musicians of the Cunningham company to perform, while expressing reservations for Untitled to be performed by others. Again, a mereological-ontological question ensues: is Toneburst a “version” of Untitled? Or is it yet another “part of a neverending series”? This paper presents a genealogical inquiry into the Untitled/Toneburst complex through detailed examination of extant sketches, instruments, and recordings. By decoding Tudor’s symbols, the components of Untitled and Toneburst have been fully identified. The analysis of recordings has further revealed that the same three source tapes were used not only in all performances of Untitled, but also in all performances of Toneburst after its revival. These revelations offer a key to articulate the idiosyncratic status of “work” in Tudor’s live-electronic music, and its connection to his distinct approach to composition and performance.

MA Thesis. Supervision: Jerrold Levinson (U. of Maryland) and Julien Deonna (U. of Geneva).
This essay is a conceptual analysis on the nature of musical genres. The main points are that they can be considered as objective social objects and that classifying a piece into a genre matters a lot for aesthetic evaluation.

More precisely I argue that musical genres are an underevaluated aspects of æsthetic evaluation mostly because they set conventionnally expected aesthetic expectations. They do that in an epistemologically objective way thanks to being what John Searle calls status functions. Furthermore, accurate categorizations of a musical piece into genres depend strongly on the piece's ontological features such as its musical (formal) structure, its musical medium (score, improvisation, recordings, ...), its historical context of creation, its process of transmission, and, importantly, the artists' categorial intentions.

A philosophical, moral and aesthetic investigation of a recent case of musical copyright litigation about a controversial piece of pop music.

Book Chapter for an anthology on
The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying,
edited by Darren Hudson Hick & Reinold Schmücker, 2016 (pp. 225-247).

Virtual Works - Actual Things addresses contemporary music ontological discourses, challenging dominant musicological accounts, questioning their authoritative foundation, and moving towards dynamic perspectives devised by music practitioners and artist researchers. Specific attention is given to the relationship between the virtual multiplicities that enable the construction of an image of a musical work, and the actual, concrete materials that make such a construction possible. With contributions by prominent scholars, this book is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of essays, which will be of great interest for artistic research, contemporary musicology, music philosophy, performance studies, and music pedagogy alike.

Paulo de Assis is a researcher affiliated with the Orpheus Institute of Ghent. He is an experimental performer, pianist, and music philosopher, with transdisciplinary interests in composition, philosophy, psychoanalysis and epistemology.

Contributors: David Davies (McGill University, Montreal), Andreas Dorschel (University of the Arts Graz), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University, New York), Kathy Kiloh (OCAD University, Toronto), Jake McNulty (Columbia University, New York), Gunnar Hindrichs (University of Basel), John Rink (University of Cambridge)

The traditional Web stores huge amount of data in the form of Relational Databases (RDB) as it is good at storing objects and relationships between them. Relational Databases are dynamic in nature which allows bringing tables together helping user to search for related material across multiple tables. RDB are scalable to expand as the data grows. The RDB uses a Structured Query Language called SQL to access the databases for several data retrieval purposes. As the world is moving today from the Syntactic form to Semantic form and the Web is also taking its new form of Semantic Web. The Structured Query of the RDB on web can be a Semantic Query on Semantic Web. The SPARQL is the Query Language recommended by W3C for the RDF(Resource Description Framework). RDF is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web and is a very important layer of the Semantic Web Architecture. In this paper we consider the Library Management System (LMS) database, taking some tuples of the LMS Relational Schema. We discuss how the RDF code is scripted and validated using RDF Validator and how RDF Triples are generated. Later we give the graphical representation of the RDF triples and see the process of extracting ontology from the RDF Schema and application of the Semantic Query.

Electronic government (e-government) has been one of the most active areas of ontology development during the past six years. In e-government, ontologies are being used to describe and specify e-government services (e-services) because they enable easy composition, matching, mapping and merging of various egovernment services. More importantly, they also facilitate the semantic integration and interoperability of e-government services. However, it is still unclear in the current literature how an existing ontology building methodology can be applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain. In this paper the Uschold and King ontology building methodology is applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain. Firstly, the Uschold and King methodology is presented, discussed and applied to build a government domain ontology. Secondly, the domain ontology is evaluated for semantic consistency using its semi-formal representation in Description Logic. Thirdly, an alignment of the domain ontology with the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) upper level ontology is drawn to allow its wider visibility and facilitate its integration with existing metadata standard. Finally, the domain ontology is formally written in Web Ontology Language (OWL) to enable its automatic processing by computers. The study aims to provide direction for the application of existing ontology building methodologies in the Semantic Web development processes of e-government domain specific ontology models; which would enable their repeatability in other e-government projects and strengthen the adoption of semantic technologies in e-government. The research would be of interest to e-government system developers as well as the Semantic Web community, as the framework and techniques employed to develop the semantic ontology models might be repeated in other domains of knowledge to build ontologies.

Beyond musical works: new perspectives on music ontology and performance

What are musical works? How are they constructed in our minds? Which material things allow us to speak about them in the first place? Does a specific way of conceiving musical works limit their performative potentials? Which alternative, more productive images of musical work can be devised?

Virtual Works – Actual Things addresses contemporary music ontological discourses, challenging dominant musicological accounts, questioning their authoritative foundation and moving towards dynamic perspectives devised by music practitioners and artist researchers. Specific attention is given to the relationship between the virtual multiplicities that enable the construction of an image of a musical work and the actual, concrete materials that make such a construction possible. With contributions by prominent scholars, this book is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of essays, which will be of great interest for artistic research, contemporary musicology, music philosophy, performance studies and music pedagogy alike.

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Contributors: David Davies (McGill University, Montreal), Andreas Dorschel (University of the Arts Graz), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University, New York), Kathy Kiloh (OCAD University, Toronto), Jake McNulty (Columbia University, New York), Gunnar Hindrichs (University of Basel), John Rink (University of Cambridge)

How does music have meaning?  Accounts describe musical meaning as autonomous (relating to music’s internal structures and properties) or as heteronomous (situating meaning as an interrelationship between the musical object and the world). 
Chapter 1 reviews the literature relating to these accounts and argues that there are no purely autonomous musical meanings and that all descriptions of musical meaning rely on heteronomous explanations. 
Chapter 2 discusses five types of explanation: Grice’s natural meaning, ‘Kantian’ transcendence, emotional accounts of meaning, semiotic explanations and, ecological descriptions which are given a place on a ‘spectrum’ of increasing heteronomy. 
Chapter 3 contends that the descriptions of musical meaning outlined in Chapter 2 are given within the Anglo-American tradition of analytical philosophy whose aesthetics rely heavily on ontological classification (descriptions of what things are).  The Continental philosophical tradition builds on the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, through Foucault and Derrida, in developing an epistemological account (the way things work and act).  These two traditions are a contrast between, respectively, what things are and how things are.  Deleuze’s ‘rhizome’ is introduced as the metaphysical space which is a bridging position between the two traditions, allowing for the necessity of ontological entities, but describing how they may interact epistemologically.  It is argued that such a metaphysics is required to describe how musical objects interact in construction of heteronomous meanings.  Toynbee and Latour are introduced as writers who describe Deleuzean rhizomatic spaces.  Toynbee’s notion of the ‘Social Author’ and Latour’s Actor Network Theory are given diagrammatic explanations which prove useful in depicting how musical meaning can emerge in the metaphorical rhizomatic space. 
Chapter 4 proposes the fungal mycelium, with its network of hyphae and fruiting bodies as a metaphor for the metaphysical space inhabited by musical meaning.  The mycelium has multi-valent connections through branchings and nodal connections allowing for material to pass around it in all directions – which is required for heteronomous accounts of musical meaning. 
Chapter 5 considers two musical exemplars; the first movement of Beethoven’s string quartet in A minor, Op. 132 and a piece composed on the iPad application GarageBand called Network.  The results of some empirical research into listeners’ responses to these two pieces are considered from a ‘mycelial’ perspective. 
It is concluded that the mycelium provides a good metaphorical description of the type of metaphysical space required to give an account of how music comes to have meaning in the world.

"This investigation provides an answer to the following ontological question: what is an acousmatic musical performance? Chapter 1 discusses acousmatic sound – a fundamental constituent of the acousmatic musical performance – and considers ways in which acousmatic sounds are determined in advance of, and during, a performance. Chapter 2 presents the acousmatic performance as an agent-centred, skilful enterprise that serves both composers and listeners through intentional communicative acts. Chapter 3 examines the nature of, and relations that hold between, acousmatic performances and acousmatic works. Chapter 4 considers interpretations of works and highlights some of the various ways in which interpretations are formulated, regulated and executed. Chapter 5 focuses upon the notion of performance authenticity and questions whether it is possible for an acousmatic performance to be considered inauthentic. Taken as a whole, these five chapters highlight the central constituents of the acousmatic
musical performance, unravel the collective input of composers, performers, listeners and technologies, and explicate the complex network of relations that coalesce within the performance environment.

The methods employed within this thesis relate to the practice of musical ontology, and have been significantly influenced by Richard Wollheim’s realist account of type and tokens (Wollheim 1980) and Stephen Davies’ notion of thick and thin musical works (Davies 2004). These ontological theories provided a method for identifying and discussing the relations that hold between acousmatic performances and acousmatic works, and were ultimately fundamental to the formulation of a bespoke type-theory that serves music of the acousmatic tradition. Accordingly, the research serves two distinct communities. On the one hand, it serves the ontological community; acousmatic music has received very little ontological attention and, as a result, this research broadens the investigative scope of the discipline whilst considering how existing theories may be applied to music of the acousmatic tradition. On the other hand, it serves the acousmatic community; by abstracting and explaining the central constituents of the acousmatic musical performance, this investigation clarifies the roles of composers, performers and listeners, and demonstrates how understanding of these roles may inform creative practice.

A portfolio consisting of six original acousmatic compositions has been produced. This compositional research allowed theoretical ideas to be tested, and works in the portfolio are cited to contextualise key points. These works can be found here: www.sargasso.com/?product=adam-stansbie-isthmus "

The discussion on uses of the concept of “musical object” highlights the difficulties of the project – put forward by Pierre Schaeffer (1966) – of basing his definition on the idea of “objet sonore”. Moreover, the idea of assimilating the functions of the “objet sonore” to those fulfilled by the concept of “musical work” turns out to be no less problematic. A new definition is proposed: a musical object is a social object resulting from the inscription of perceived sound(s) or of the acoustic event(s)/object(s) in a system of references recognized as musical by a group consisting of at least two people.

This article builds on C. S. Peirce’s suggestive blueprint for an inclusive outlook that grants reality to his three categories. Moving away from the usual focus on (contentious) cosmological forces, I use a modal principle to partition various ontological layers: regular sign-action (like coded language) subsumes actual sign-action (like here-and-now events) which in turn subsumes possible sign-action (like qualities related to whatever would be similar to them). Once we realize that the triadic sign’s components are each answerable to this asymmetric subsumption, we obtain the means to track at which level of complexity semiosis finds itself, in a given case. Since the bulk of such a “trinitarian” metaphysics would be devoted to countenancing un-interpreted phenomena, I argue that current misgivings about sign-based ontologies are largely misplaced.

This article sketches a new image of musical works, situated beyond the «work concept», critically rethinking existing music ontologies, and grounded on Gilles Deleuze's central ontological commitments. After situating the problem (1), the paper discusses current issues in music ontol-ogy (2), explores specific Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian ontological concepts (3), and argues for a new image of musical works (4), which are more aptly described as assemblages (5), as highly complex, historically constructed multiplicities defined by virtual structures, intensive processes, and actual things.

Electroacoustic music occupies a curious position within the arts. On the one hand, it appears to be aligned with the plastic arts, such as painting and sculpture; composers often refer to the haptic, kinaesthetic and even proprioceptive nature of their compositional acts in terms of crafting, moulding and sculpting sounds in the studio. On the other hand, electroacoustic music appears be aligned with the performing arts, such as drama, dance and most forms of instrumental music; the proliferation of diffusion systems and the increasing sophistication of tools for real-time spatialisation lend credence to associations with traditional notions of performance practice. This paper seeks to demystify this ostensible paradox. It starts considering an ontological distinction that holds between the plastic arts and the performing arts, goes on to consider whether electroacoustic music is ontologically similar to one or the other, and concludes with the following point: electroacoustic music may be characterised by either plasticity or performance but, in many cases, it falls between these polarities. This observation may help to explain why some philosophers, aestheticians and musicologists have struggled to accept electroacoustic music whilst enabling one to identify where the unique value of this exciting and uncompromising art-form resides.

Musical works are odd entities. They consist of multiply instanced sounds, and (often) scores, while not being easily reducible to either. Whereas it is quite easy to say where the Mona Lisa is (the Louvre in Paris of course), the question, where is Beethoven's Eroica symphony? seems almost laughably bizarre. One could have a score of it, a sound recording of it and be present at a performance of it as an instrumentalist, conductor or audience member, yet its totality seemingly transcends all of these particular instances. Indeed, the very fact that we use such qualifying words as " score, " " recording " and " performance " implicitly affirms our belief in the existence of something more to a work then these individual instances. But if so, what kind of a thing is a musical work? This, in a nutshell, is the primary question of musical ontology—a philosophical field that has been the subject of extensive recent debate on account of the increasingly recognized historically and culturally contingent importance that the work concept has played in the history of European high art music, at least over the last two centuries. As the primacy of this genre of music, and of European-derived culture more generally, has come under increasing question, however, various attempts have been made to reconcile a work-concept understanding of music with the vast array of other kinds of music. For prior to the last few decades, inquiries concerning the ontology of music, when they occurred at all, were overwhelmingly based solely on the " classical " musical tradition even though it obviously encompasses but a limited selection of the plethora of musical possibilities. Using musical improvisation as an important alternative musical practice, this paper discusses and critiques various ontological musical theories in order to show how they fail to realize their stated goals, and what is therefore left as a plausible theory of the ontology of music.

What do we mean when we talk about the identity of a musical work and what does such an identity involve? What in fact are the properties that make it something worth protecting and preserving? These issues are not only of legal relevance; they are central to a philosophical discipline that has seen considerable advances over the last few decades: musical ontology. Taking into account its main theoretical models, this essay argues that an understanding of the ontological status of musical works should acknowledge the irreducible ambivalence of music as an “art of the trace” and as a “performative art.” It advocates a theory of the musical work as a “social object” and, more specifically, as a sound artefact that functions aesthetically and which is based on a trace informed by a normative value. Such a normativity is further explored in relation to three primary ways of conceiving and fixing the trace: orality, notation and phonography.

Although an ontological approach to musical works has dominated analytic aesthetics for almost fifty years, criticisms have recently started to spread in the philosophical literature. Contestants blame mainstream musical ontology for lacking historical awareness, questioning the cogency of metaphysical proposals that are substantially essentialist with regard to our musical concepts. My aim in this paper is to address this accusation by engaging the historicist critics in a sustained debate. I argue that even if the arguments based on history and sociology turn out to be accurate, this may not be enough of a reason to abandon the ontological project altogether. Ontology and history do not necessarily clash. Moreover, historical-sociological examinations do not fulfil our philosophical interest in music. I conclude by making a plea to "historical ontology," a perspective that does not reject ontology but closely connects it to the dialectic between historical research and aesthetic interest.

En musique, comme dans d'autres arts performatifs, la performance s'avère partagée entre l'idée d'un acte qui a une valeur intrinsèque et l'idée d'un acte qui vaut en tant qu'instance d'une trace préexistante. Dans le premier cas, l'attention se concentre sur le résultat de l'action produite ; dans le second, sur un événement qui tire une certaine partie de sa valeur de sa conformité à une trace ré-identifiable. Une réflexion sur cette polarité nous incite à recentrer les objectifs de l'analyse de la performance en tenant compte du statut qu'elle assume dans les différentes pratiques musicales orales, écrites et phonographiques.

I suoni e le immagini sembrano appartenere a due forme dell’esperienza profondamente distinte. Due registri sensoriali antitetici cui corrispondono due fenomeni accostabili, ma mai completamente unibili. Eppure si ricorre spesso all’espressione immagine sonora, che cosa si intende precisamente? Esiste un punto in cui i suoni e le immagini si appartengono reciprocamente? Può un’immagine risuonare e un suono essere anche un’immagine? Il testo cerca di rispondere a questi quesiti scavando e intarsiando una concettualizzazione dell’immagine sonora attraverso un dialogo con la semiotica, la fenomenologia e la filosofia dell’arte. Arricchendosi di una riflessione sul rapporto con il pensiero, l’indagine sull’immagine sonora si declina in tre momenti distinti: il suono con un fondamento d’immagine in cui l’elemento fondante è dato dalla presenza dell’immagine nel suono; il suono e l’immagine che si equivalgono orizzontalmente fondendosi l’uno con l’altra; l’immagine con un fondamento sonoro, in cui si rintracciano presenze sonore nell’immagine visiva.

Compared with other musical instruments, percussion is unparalleled in its diversity, and the palette of sonic and timbral possibilities is vast. Developing a means of effectively describing the diversity of percussion is the primary goal of this research, and thus the Percussive Audio Lexicon (PAL) is proposed.

The challenge of providing semantically rich information about recorded sounds – and the sources that produce them – has inspired a number of approaches and schemes seeking to address the issue. Taxonomies, ontologies and folksonomies of semantic descriptors for musical instruments, music recordings, music samples and sound effects exist in various domains including the Semantic Web, online databases and stand-alone software applications. However, none exist that exclusively address drums and percussion in the form that is proposed with PAL.

An ontology of sorts, PAL offers an approach to describing the ‘state’ of virtually any percussion instrument producing a specific sound at a moment in time, from multiple perspectives simultaneously. As a theoretical tool it can be used to learn about percussion, compare similarities and differences between sounds, and explore correlations between sound and source. In the applied environment it can be used to tag percussion samples in sound libraries with a comprehensive set of semantic descriptors.

At the heart of the lexicon lie 35 Attributes of percussion instrument morphology, excitation, spectral/temporal features, descriptive adjectives and onomatopoeia. Attributes are populated with over 2500 descriptors, organised categorically in a hierarchical tree-branch structure, and distributed across three interrelated trees called Source, Sound and Subject. Up to 81 descriptors can be selected simultaneously across any or all of the trees. Attributes that address quantifiable features of time, frequency and timbre are measured with Semantic Differential (SD) scales. Descriptors are encoded with an alphanumeric ID, which acts as a form of shorthand and notational hierarchy for the lexicon.

The lexicon’s content has been developed using a range of methodologies including direct examination of instruments, audio analyses of samples, and a listening survey conducted with volunteer participants. Results from the survey verify that using descriptors from the Subject tree are meaningful and useful. Where used, points on spectral and temporal SD scales are quantified using an approach that maps the features of analysed instruments over an approximate exponential curve.

A selection of percussion samples have successfully been tagged with descriptors and are presented in the appendices and support materials, which are also located online at http://tinyurl.com/pal-thesis-files.

The field of interactive music systems (IMSs), beginning in the 1980s, is still relatively young and fast moving. The field of music theory-analysis, during the same period (since 1980), has undergone a major transformation in terms of technological innovations, flexibility, and breadth. The two fields have not really caught up with each other. It will be interesting to see what arises as they do — especially as both fields have become more concerned with the role of the body and embodied cognition. Framed in terms of contrasting epistemological orientations, this essay considers some relevant developments in IMSs, music cognition, and music theory and analysis, leading up to the present.  The most popular approaches to music cognition and to IMS design are rationalist (Ashby 2010), exploiting the ‘correct’ embodiments of music (Godøy 2004, Leman 2007, Paine 2009) based on affordances (Gibson 1977, Kelso 1998). This essay, however, advocates a pragmatist (Ashby 2010) approach inspired by music analysis and exploiting the potential of kinesthetic learning (associative learning). Prompted by a progressive approach to music analysis, theory, perception, and cognition (Dubiel 1999, Mailman 2007), interactive music technology can also be constructive, flexible, and progressive, by exploiting kinesthetic learning from immersion in new and unusual motion-to-sound mappings derived from dynamic formal processes in analysed music. In this way, immersive interactive systems offer an opportunity systematically to learn new associations based on principles theorised in response to analysis. Experience of these systems essentially ‘rewires the brain’, thereby exemplifying what Korsyn (2004) has attributed to Lewin’s (1986, 1987) approach to music perception: the ironist approach, as formulated by Rorty (1989). Thus a pragmatist ironist experimental (PIE) approach is articulated. Rather than committing to any particular ways music is already embodied, this approach acknowledges the flexible nature of embodied musical experience. It forges and uses interactive music technologies continually to redescribe and therefore reform how music is embodied, thereby disembodying to re-embody music, expanding how music is heard, contemplated and experienced.

A large part of the ontology of music is formalistic and objectivistic: it regards musical works as kinds of objects, whether abstract or concrete, which are to be understood as formal structures. The problem with this view is that this is not enough to explain our musical experience: music is not only heard and understood in terms of objects, facts or structures, but also in terms of events, activities or processes, that take place or occur here and now.

In this paper I will offer a programmatic hint of how musical ontology can accommodate this ordinary intuition. In order to do that, I will take into consideration the practice of musical improvisation. The focus on improvisation, instead of on works, is useful to reshape the discourse of musical ontology in non-formalistic and non-objectivist terms.

Technical reproducibility and recording have had important consequences on the production of musical works. The ontological identity and aesthetic functioning of the latter are explained in this article in the light of three main ways of organisation of musical cultures: oral, written, and phonographic. A solution to the difficulties and the conceptual conflicts arising from their overlap is identified in the analysis of the contexts of production and reception of the different devices.

With the development of sound production and processing technologies, composers' private rooms stopped delimiting the boundaries of musical creativity, which started inhabiting recording studios instead. Here memory, traditionally entrusted to paper and to the silence of the musical text, met a technology that enabled to record sounds directly, thus achieving the acoustic fulfilment of the composer's thought. The crystalline abstraction of musical notation gave way to a world of sounds submerged in noise as well as in human and technological indeterminacy: it is a world that requires specific control strategies and direct confrontation with performance practices and listening within a complex system. Composers were tossed into this system, becoming performers and active observers of their own work. Thus, the linearity of Shannon’s model of communication was altered. In his works on musical semiology, Jean-Jacques Nattiez had already modified the model from Sender -> Message -> Receiver to Poietic dimension -> Trace <- Esthesic dimension. The rise of the composer as an active observer requires a new transformation of the model of communication, creating a continuous feedback between the different elements. This feedback will often involve the listener as well. The electronic music work can therefore be seen as a self-organizing system that includes in itself the electronic devices as well as the human factor that operates them. In this system, compositional models are the invariants that vouch for the identity and recognisability of the work.

Στα πλαίσια του μαθήματος ‘‘Φιλοσοφία της μουσικής’’, ζητήθηκε η παράδοση μίας τελικής εργασίας. Το θέμα που διάλεξα έχει τίτλο ‘‘Οντολογία του μουσικού έργου’’. Ο επιβλέπων καθηγητής, στην ερώτησή μου: ‘’Τι σημαίνει οντολογία;’’, μου εξήγησε ότι η οντολογία ορίζεται από ερωτήσεις σχετικά με τον ον, όπως: τί είναι, που είναι, τί σημαίνει, γιατί είναι, πώς είναι , πότε είναι κλπ. Επίσης, με παρότρυνε να ασχοληθώ με τις αναζητήσεις του Αριστοτέλη.
Κάθε φιλόσοφος, σε κάθε εποχή, έχει ως βάση, μια επιστήμη. Αναζητεί κάτι που δεν απαντάται από την επιστήμη. Ο Αριστοτέλης είχε ως βασική επιστήμη, τη βιολογία. Η αριστοτελική σκέψη στηρίζεται στην έννοια του οργανισμού και αναδεικνύει την αναλογία της ζωής αυτού του οργανισμού, στην κοινωνική και πολιτική πραγματικότητα.
Η ανάγνωση των έργων ‘‘Μετά τα φυσικά’’ και ‘‘Ποιητικής’’ του Αριστοτέλη, ομολογώ ότι δεν με ενέπνευσε ώστε να ασχοληθώ σε αυτή την εργασία, με την αριστοτελική σκέψη. Αλλά με οδήγησε να αναζητήσω κι άλλες φιλοσοφικές προσεγγίσεις, σχετικά με την οντολογία. Πολλοί φιλόσοφοι, αλλά και επιστήμονες του θετικού κλάδου, έχουν ασχοληθεί με την οντολογία. Λίγοι με την οντολογία του μουσικού έργου. Αυτή η διαπίστωσή μου, με έπεισε να προσεγγίσω, βασιζόμενη στη φιλοσοφική προσέγγιση του Alain Badiou - Γάλλος φιλόσοφος (1937-), ο οποίος έχει ασχοληθεί με την έννοια της ύπαρξης, με έναν τρόπο που, όπως υποστηρίζει, δεν είναι ούτε μεταμοντέρνος αλλά ούτε απλά μια επανάληψη της νεωτερικότητας- και στη θεωρία των συνόλων, με έναν δικό μου τρόπο, την οντολογία του μουσικού έργου.
Η εργασία μου χωρίζεται σε τέσσερα κεφάλαια, όπου στο πρώτο κεφάλαιο, παρουσιάζω τη θεώρηση του Badiou, στο δεύτερο κεφάλαιο, βασικά σημεία της θεωρίας των συνόλων, στο τρίτο κεφάλαιο, την παράλληλη πορεία της θεώρησης του Badiou με τη θεωρία των συνόλων και στο τέταρτο κεφάλαιο, την προσάρμοση αυτών, στην οντολογία του μουσικού έργου.

L’enquête ontologique est-elle de mise lorsque l’on fait de la musique l’objet d’un questionnement esthétique, et notamment lorsqu’on se propose d’examiner les appréciations que nous portons sur elle dans des contextes réels? La réponse est souvent négative. Cet article vise à montrer comment nous avons au contraire intérêt à ne pas négliger un tel questionnement. Pour ce faire, il développe une discussion sur la signification qu’assume la recherche ontologique appliquée à la musique et un commentaire de quelques exemples susceptibles de faire émerger un point de jonction entre esthétique et ontologie.
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Ontological models have been formulated recently from different philosophical perspectives in order to explain the several ‘modes of existence’ of musical works. The relevance of such investigations in the context of taking music as an object of aesthetic inquiry has sometimes been questioned, especially when considering the ways in which music is actually apprehended by listeners. According to some scholars, ontology has nothing to do with this topic. The present article aims to show in what sense it is appropriate not to ignore this field of investigation and its results. The meaning of ontological researches on music is discussed and some examples are presented and commented on. The interest of examining the criteria of identity of musical works is highlighted so as to understand the formulation of aesthetic judgements in varying cultural contexts.

The discussion about the uses of the concept “musical object” highlights the difficulties of the project – put forward by Pierre Schaeffer (1966) – of basing its definition on the idea of “objet sonore”. Moreover, the proposal to assimilate the functions of the “objet sonore” to those fulfilled by a “musical work” turns out to be no less problematic. A new definition is proposed: a musical object is a social object resulting from the inscription of perceived sound(s), or of the acoustic event(s)/object(s), in a reference system recognized as “musical” by a group of (minimally) two people.

During the course of the industrial 4.0 era, companies have been exponentially developed and have digitized almost the whole business system to stick to their performance targets and to keep or to even enlarge their market share. Maintenance function has obviously followed the trend as it's considered one of the most important processes in every enterprise as it impacts a group of the most critical performance indicators such as: cost, reliability, availability, safety and productivity. E-maintenance emerged in early 2000 and now is a common term in maintenance literature representing the digitalized side of maintenance whereby assets are monitored and controlled over the internet. According to literature, e-maintenance has a remarkable impact on maintenance KPIs and aims at ambitious objectives like zero-downtime.

The present article aims at analyzing the social and ontological effects of listening music online, with particular attention to the artistic practice of improvisation. In the first paragraph, I will briefly explain the essential concepts which ontology of music has traditionally counted on, and I will suggest an alternative theoretical approach, that I define as ontology of musical act. Then I will investigate the relation between recording practices and improvisation. In the final paragraph I will compare some features of musical recordings (suggested by Andrew Kania) with those of technological devices that allow us to listen music online.

Per quanto le avanguardie ci abbiano invitato ad allargare i confini dell’opera musicale, non c’è ragione di pensare che qualsiasi oggetto o evento possa presentarsi come un’opera musicale. Questo problema è stato affrontato in base ad alcuni principali argomenti: 1) storico/concettuale (senza che ci sia l’idea di opera non ci possono essere opere); 2) ontologico (perché ci sia un’opera occorrono determinate caratteristiche oggettive e strutturali); 3) estetico-valutativo (è opera un oggetto musicale che, di fatto, viene concepito alla luce di un circuito di valutazione). Ripercorreremo queste piste per cercare di capire quale, in fin dei conti, si rivela essere la più pertinente nel delimitare l'effettivo modo di funzionare dell’opera musicale. Questa riflessione dovrebbe permetterci di chiarire in certo modo i rapporti fra estetica e ontologia, e in particolare il primato che è stato talvolta accordato alla seconda nello stabilire un quadro di riflessione di pertinenza estetica.

In this paper, I investigate one popular view in current methodological debate about musical ontology, namely, descriptivism. According to descriptivism, the task of musical ontology is to offer a description of the 'structure of our thought' (Kania, 2008, p. 437) about musical works, as it manifests itself in actual musical practices. In this regard, descriptivists often appeal to our pre-theoretical intuitions to ground ontological theories of musical works. This method, however, is worrisome, as such intuitions are unstable and contradictory. For example, there is a broad variety of intuitions in our musical practice concerning what counts as an authentic performance of a musical work. All such intuitions reflect at least a part of actual practice; however, they are in conflict with each other. This raises a problem, for how can they thus represent a reliable basis for our ontology? A further worry for descriptivism concerns the triviality of the knowledge it gives us access to. If, according to descriptivism, the task of musical ontologists is simply to codify the regularities found in our intuitive thought or discourse about practice, then how can the resulting theories be informative at all with regard to the object of their concern?

The 'audiotactile principle' is revealed through the perspective of the pareysonian philosophy as forming energy that concerns the notion of 'formativity'. In the article the implications of this attribution are analyzed, in particular in the connections with improvisational practices.

This study, based on the conceptual framework of the Theory of Audiotactile Music proposed by Vincenzo Caporaletti, focuses on the relationship between work and performance in the audiotactile aesthetic dimension of improvisation. The problem becomes crucial in improvisation on a jazz piece built on the harmonic structure of another work (contrafact). Starting from the observation that the relationship between the work and the performance is problematic in jazz if it embraces an inadequate ontology, as the structuralist-Platonist ontology based on the distinction type / token, and then assuming that the solution of the ontological questions it is not possible before the hermeneutic understanding of aesthetic practices, it is shown that the relationship type / token is not sufficient to distinguish the " work concept " in Western art music by the improvisational practices of audiotactile musics (jazz, rock, pop, world music).