Extended musicking, extended mind, extended agency. Notes on the third wave

Abstract

Abstract The conceptual resources of ‘4E’ music cognition – i.e. the embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive paradigms – have offered a rich set of tools to explore the nature of musical experience. Among these four approaches, the extended mind perspective has heretofore received less overall attention. In this paper we focus on further developing the musically extended mind - especially in regards to musical performance - drawing on recent third wave developments. After exploring the main tenets of first wave (parity between internal and external components), second wave (complementarity between internal and external components), and third wave (dynamically changing internal and external components, as well as extended and decentralized agency) accounts of the extended mind, we turn to introducing existent first and second wave positions on music cognition. While they offer important insights, we suggest that elements of the third wave, especially focused on decentralized agency, are needed to capture the complexities of musical performance. We apply the third wave tools to the case of music performance in order to show, first, the specific limitations of the first two waves focus on parity and complementarity and, second, how a third wave account may be developed by applying it within this particular context.