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The links between musical sound and various body movements are so numerous and robust that researchers have come to believe that sensations of body movement are integral to musical experience as such, or to put it differently, that the perception and cognition of music is a fusion of auditory and motor sensations. In the context of music and consciousness, one consequence of this auditory-motor fusion is the belief that awareness of musical sound can be understood as an awareness of various sound-related actions. For this reason, this chapter focuses on sound-action awareness in music. It presents a spectrum of research that may shed light on this as well as some ideas on how sound-action awareness might encourage us to revise established ways of thinking in Western music theory.

This chapter provides a discussion on the evidence on musical sound processing. Data acquired in the mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm have shown that temporally and spectrally complex sounds as well as their relations are automatically represented in the human auditory cortex. Furthermore, the MMN data indicate that these neural sound representations are spatially distinct between phonetic and musical sounds within and between the cerebral hemispheres. The majority of the MMN studies were conducted in pitch dimension but also temporal aspects of sound processing are under increasing experimentation. Up to some extent, also musical expertise is reflected in sound representation accuracy as indexed by the MMN. In addition, an overview on studies using musical sounds and sound successions to investigate the automatic neural sound processing is given. The chapter then outlines the recent studies comparing musicians and nonmusicians. In general, the results offer fundamental insight to the brains' ability to encode and differentiate acoustically complex sounds despite the focus of the listener's attention.

This chapter considers Shakespeare's exploration of musical harmony as a means of political representation. Jacques Attali, French economist and former adviser to President Mitterand, famously claimed that “listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political.” From Julius Caesar to The Tempest, Shakespeare restores to music the “noisiness” that Attali sees as instrumental to its demystification. In this way, Shakespeare allows his audience to witness the political appropriation of music and compare it to their own listening experience, even at the risk of exposing his own plays as artificial constructions. Rather than make use of music's interpretive promiscuity to create a sense of dramatic unity, Shakespeare's plays often highlight the incongruence between language and musical sound—an incongruence that is always a possibility when someone attempts to describe an actual musical performance.

This chapter points to aesthetics developments that are partly inspired by technological developments (particularly the move from analogue to digital sound). Increasingly, film sound effects work less to bolster a sense of verisimilitude than as an aesthetic effect in themselves. Sound design in many films might be understood as essentially musical in nature, following a musical logic rather than any other. Any movement from speech-centered film to one that allows more prominence to ‘noises’ is potentially a shift from film dominated by synchronized dialogue to one with significant amounts of asynchrony and sound as an effect in itself, whether through loud music or featured sounds. This chapter also suggests that the sometimes startling collapse of the space between diegetic sound and non-diegetic music manifests to a degree a collapse of psychological space.

While new scholarship on Prokofiev and Eisenstein continues to emerge, there has been surprisingly little written about Prokofiev’s film scores as they relate to Eisenstein’s theories on music and sound. Eisenstein considered “sound imagery” to be as important as visual imagery in film, and with the advent of sound film in the late 1920s, he began writing essays on the subject. Many musicologists have expertly discussed Prokofiev’s music in Eisenstein’s films, and film historians have long considered Eisenstein’s theories on sound and how they function generally in his films. Until recently, however, very few scholars have attempted to merge a close reading of Eisenstein’s theories with an analysis of Prokofiev’s music. This chapter helps to bridge this gap in scholarship by examining Eisenstein’s late theories on music and sound from his essay “The Music of Landscape” in relation to Prokofiev’s score for Ivan the Terrible.