This is the video of the Zoom session on Saturday 2nd May 2020 and includes various contributors – Lemon Guo, Mengtai Zhang, Nassos Polyzoidis, Ziazan and Madison Miller – discussing their contributions with Simon Zagorski-Thomas and other members of the C21MP network.
Transcript of Simon’s statement from the start of the video session:
It’s been fascinating to see all the different ways in which people have come to this question – and I’d like to thank you all for sharing your wonderful, varied and thought provoking work with us. While the notions of deduction and induction are most commonly associated with research methods, I also want to think about them from a cognitive perspective: about the twin forms of bottom up and top down processing that our brains engage in during their everyday activity. It’s not that we’re doing one rather than the other at any given moment but it’s about the interesting ways in which these two processes interact. On the one hand we’re both learning from experience as new things happen to us and we identify repeated patterns in that experience and, at the same time, those patterns of previous experience become templates for what we expect in any given moment. These two forms of bottom up activity are driven by the incoming data of our experience – to create new expectations based on experience and to allow us to act and think semi-automatically by following the well-worn pathways of previous experience – when a and b happen, I do x and y and then c and d happen – the subconscious learned habits that we don’t need to think about. And these form the basis of a lot of our musical learning – about how to respond to particular stimuli without having to think consciously. On the other hand, we have the conscious process of seeking out connections between different types of experience and different types of action – that we can map a particular set of sounds to a particular emotional narrative, or use an instrument in a new way to create different sounds – we can choose to separate out some features of a specific experience from the others and look for different features that we can map them onto – and create a connection between them that wasn’t there before. And I can think of interesting ways in which each of the submissions involves aspects of both of these ways of thinking.