Prospective View on Sound Synthesis BCI Control in Light of Two Paradigms of Cognitive Neuroscience - Guide to Brain-Computer Music Interfacing - page 62

(observer) in more traditional synthesis approaches where only acoustic consider-
ations are taken into account, to a first-person position (implied) in the perceptual

synthesis processes. This corresponds to a change from a representational to a
neurophenomenological point of view in the

field of cognitive neuroscience (Varela
1996 ). We here adopt a similar change of viewpoint to investigate the phenomenon
of sound perception as it was seminally studied in (Petitmengin et al. 2009 ).
Classically, in the standard paradigm of cognitive neuroscience, there is, on one
hand, the physical object and on the other hand, the subject that perceives this
object according to his/her mental representation of the physical reality. From this
conception of representation proposed by Descartes, a representational-computa-
tional paradigm has been developed. This paradigm involves the existence of a
correct representation of the physical world and assumes that the perception of the
object is all the more adequate when the subject is mental representation matches

the physical reality, considered as the reference (Varela 1989 ). Less classically, in
the neurophenomenological paradigm of cognitive sciences, it is the interaction
between the subject and the object, which enables the subject to perceive an object.
F. Varela called this interaction: enaction (Varela 1989 ; Varela et al. 1991 ). In the
enactive paradigm, the mind and the surrounding world are mutually imbricated.
This conception is inspired from the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl, who
called this interaction a noetic

'

noematic correlation (Husserl 1950 ). He posited that
there was a link between intentional content on the one hand, and extra-mental
reality on the other, such that the structure of intentionality of the consciousness
informs us about how we perceive the world as containing particular objects. In a
certain manner, and quite caricatured, the physical reality is no more the reference,
and the subject becomes the reference. The perception of the object is all the more
adequate when the subject

-

ciently conduct an
action to respond to a task. As Varela puts it (Varela et al. 1991 ):

' s perception makes it possible to ef

The enactive approach underscores the importance of two interrelated points: 1) perception
consists of perceptually guided action and 2) cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent
sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided.

and concludes:

We found a world enacted by our history of structural coupling.

In 1966, P. Schaeffer, who was both a musician and a researcher, published the

“ (Schaeffer 1966 ), in which he reported more than ten

years of research on electroacoustic music. He conducted a substantial work that
was of importance for electroacoustic musicians. With a multidisciplinary
approach, he intended to carry out fundamental music research that included both
Concrete 1 and traditional music. Interestingly, he naturally and implicitly adopted a
phenomenological approach to investigate the sound perception in listening

Trait é des objets musicaux ”

1

The term “ concrete ” is related to a compositional method which is based on concrete material,
i.e., recorded or synthesized sounds, in opposition with “ abstract ” music which is composed in an
abstract manner, i.e., from ideas written on a score, and becomes “ concrete ” afterwards.