Roberto David Rusconi's Page

Our goal is to communicate and spread the idea that intuition is necessary but not sufficient anymore: we need to implement our capabilities supplementing composers and artists, as well as students, citizens and cultural operatives with additional knowledge of what they really hear when they listen to the music! Our intention is to send a first clear message of how a new attitude is necessary to break through counterintuitive barriers into new realm of artistic expressions.Minds need to reach, not simply grasp, brains need to be challenged not simply pampered. If the artistic mind is to achieve all that can be achieved, it would be wrongheaded to focus on the limitations of human mind.But neither is the case that anything is possible. Humans are biological beings living in a social and physical world. In pursuing the goal constrains are to be taken into account. To ignore these costrains is to exist in a naive a delusional world. Ignorance is not imagination not should wishful thinking masquerade as artistic insight. So if we want to expand artistic horizons and foster creativity, ans we want because we simply shame those who are stuck in the past, there is no better approach than improving our understanding of how minds (composers-performers and listeners) work .

Perception is an active process, which involves making predictions; the need for making better predictions drives the formation of useful representations and a cognitive hierarchy. Music is considered to be universal. It contains temporally extended yet predictable patterns; it is governed by stylistic rules or conventions, and perception evolves in time

In the last two decades an important shift has occurred in music research,
that is, from music as an art (or art object) to music as a process in which the performer, the listener, and music as sound play a central role. This transformation is most notable in the field of systematic musicology, which developed from “a mere extension of musicology” into a “complete reorientation of the discipline to fundamental questions which are non-historical in nature, [encompassing] research into the nature and properties of music as an acoustical, psychological and cognitive phenomenon” (Duckles & Pasler,
2001).It is high time that we left the battlefields where the Second Viennese School, and then later composers like Ligeti and Grisey fought for new sounds and new ears. It is time, to mix metaphors, to sow musical seed on the ground which has been won – ground which belongs jointly to the listener of today and the art of today. To answer to this question I would like to hold out a new prospect of creating music and art which should not only be post-avant-garde, but actually post-ideological: I believe it is of the utmost importance aiming to reconnect the composer, the performer and the listener with the basic elements of music sound and emotion, obviously understanding everything as a whole and from a new perspective: the 21st century one.
Like language, music is a uniquely human capacity that arguably played a central role in the origins of human development. The ways in which music can illuminate fundamental issues in cognition have been under examined, or even dismissed as epiphenomenal. However, cognition in music is more and more acknowledged as fundamental to our understanding of human nature, hence music cognition should be able to contribute both conceptually and methodologically to music composition and performance.
The first approach will be the one suggested by Empirical musicology, which grew out of a desire to ground theories on empirical observation and to construct theories on the basis of the analysis and interpretation of such observations.
The arrival of new technologies, most notably that of MIDI and of the personal computer, were instrumental to the considerable increase in the number of empirically oriented investigations into music. I join David Huron* who refers to this reorientation as 'new empiricism' and considers it, along with 'new musicology,' the most influential movement in recent music research.

Thanks D.H.*
Roberto David Rusconi Intrasonus AD