September 11 - 12, 2017

Venue:

Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg
Lehmkuhlenbusch 4
27753 Delmenhorst

Organizer:

Dr. Jin Hyun Kim
HWK-Fellow/Freie Universität Berlin
(in Collaboration with Prof. Dr. Georg Mohr, Universität Bremen)

September 11 - 12, 2017

Venue:

Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg
Lehmkuhlenbusch 4
27753 Delmenhorst

Organizer:

Dr. Jin Hyun Kim
HWK-Fellow/Freie Universität Berlin
(in Collaboration with Prof. Dr. Georg Mohr, Universität Bremen)

Music and dance share significant shaping principles. Both are accomplished through the course of a practice based on a performative activity, and mainly composed of bodily nonverbal expressions. These range from immediate manifestations of arousal to structured organizations shaping abstract patterns of sounds or corporeal gestures. Though highly organized music and dance based on inherited cultural knowledge that can and should be learned explicitly cannot be grasped without concepts, it should be acknowledged that there are often non-conceptual bodily experiences of music and dance.

In this context, a recent discourse on kinaesthetic empathy appropriating choreographic terms in light of a number of neuroscientific studies on empathy becomes the focus of attention. The term “kinaesthetic empathy” has been coined, taking up the notion of aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung), which was developed in the context of psychological aesthetics at the end of the 19th century. Einfühlung is the original German term for empathy; currently used to refer to the intersubjective understanding of others’ feelings unmediated by the rational mode of thinking, it originally referred to the implicit and immediate processes underlying aesthetic experience related to an aesthetic object—as opposed to both purely objectivist and subjectivist theories of aesthetics. In contrast to objectivist theories, the aesthetics of empathy does justice to feelings emerging during aesthetic experience; the difference from subjectivist theories lies in the focus of the aesthetics of Einfühlung on actual feelings unified with reproduced ones, which emerge in the course of “inner imitation (innere Imitation)”. Theodor Lipps characterizes this process of inner doing as a kind of image of movement, which does not necessarily lead to what he terms organic sensations, such as muscle contraction or relaxation, i.e. kinaesthetic sensations. The image of movement Lipps introduces as a basis for aesthetic Einfühlung has been characterized by Edward Bradford Titchener—who coined the term “empathy” as a rendering of Einfühlung in his Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes in 305—as the kinaesthetic image, distinct from the kinaesthetic sensation.

Neuroscientific studies on the neural mechanisms of action simulation that is supposed to underlie perception, carried out over the last 15 years since the discovery of mirror neurons, provide empirical evidence of Lipps’ core idea of inner action accompanying perception of meaningful events. However, it should be pointed out that it remains unclear whether perception of certain types of events always involves action simulation, and whether action simulation not only acts as prediction of action but also leads to kinaesthetic sensation beyond the kinaesthetic image.

A critical question to be discussed at the conference is therefore whether only the kinaesthetic image comes into play for the aesthetic experience of music and dance, as Lipps contends, or if the kinaesthetic image cannot be decoupled from the kinaesthetic sensation, which calls for revising Lipps’ notion of inner doing underlying empathy. To address this question, the conference brings together neuroscientists, philosophers, cognitive musicologists and dance researchers who have investigated neural mechanisms of action-perception loops, aesthetic empathy, action simulation and kinaesthetic sensation related to music and/or dance.

Music and dance share significant shaping principles. Both are accomplished through the course of a practice based on a performative activity, and mainly composed of bodily nonverbal expressions. These range from immediate manifestations of arousal to structured organizations shaping abstract patterns of sounds or corporeal gestures. Though highly organized music and dance based on inherited cultural knowledge that can and should be learned explicitly cannot be grasped without concepts, it should be acknowledged that there are often non-conceptual bodily experiences of music and dance.

In this context, a recent discourse on kinaesthetic empathy appropriating choreographic terms in light of a number of neuroscientific studies on empathy becomes the focus of attention. The term “kinaesthetic empathy” has been coined, taking up the notion of aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung), which was developed in the context of psychological aesthetics at the end of the 19th century. Einfühlung is the original German term for empathy; currently used to refer to the intersubjective understanding of others’ feelings unmediated by the rational mode of thinking, it originally referred to the implicit and immediate processes underlying aesthetic experience related to an aesthetic object—as opposed to both purely objectivist and subjectivist theories of aesthetics. In contrast to objectivist theories, the aesthetics of empathy does justice to feelings emerging during aesthetic experience; the difference from subjectivist theories lies in the focus of the aesthetics of Einfühlung on actual feelings unified with reproduced ones, which emerge in the course of “inner imitation (innere Imitation)”. Theodor Lipps characterizes this process of inner doing as a kind of image of movement, which does not necessarily lead to what he terms organic sensations, such as muscle contraction or relaxation, i.e. kinaesthetic sensations. The image of movement Lipps introduces as a basis for aesthetic Einfühlung has been characterized by Edward Bradford Titchener—who coined the term “empathy” as a rendering of Einfühlung in his Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes in 305—as the kinaesthetic image, distinct from the kinaesthetic sensation.

Neuroscientific studies on the neural mechanisms of action simulation that is supposed to underlie perception, carried out over the last 15 years since the discovery of mirror neurons, provide empirical evidence of Lipps’ core idea of inner action accompanying perception of meaningful events. However, it should be pointed out that it remains unclear whether perception of certain types of events always involves action simulation, and whether action simulation not only acts as prediction of action but also leads to kinaesthetic sensation beyond the kinaesthetic image.

A critical question to be discussed at the conference is therefore whether only the kinaesthetic image comes into play for the aesthetic experience of music and dance, as Lipps contends, or if the kinaesthetic image cannot be decoupled from the kinaesthetic sensation, which calls for revising Lipps’ notion of inner doing underlying empathy. To address this question, the conference brings together neuroscientists, philosophers, cognitive musicologists and dance researchers who have investigated neural mechanisms of action-perception loops, aesthetic empathy, action simulation and kinaesthetic sensation related to music and/or dance.

September 11, 2017

13:00 – 14:00     Lunch
14:00 – 14:30     Jin Hyun Kim (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg): Opening Address
14:30 – 15:15     Valeria Gazzola (University of Groningen): The Kinaesthetic Side
                              of Empathy
15:15 – 15:30     Bérangère Thirioux (Charité, Universitätsmedizin Berlin): 
                              Commentary on “The Kinaesthetic Side of Empathy“
15:30 – 15:50     Discussion
15:50 – 16:15     Coffee Break
16:15 – 17:00     Corinne Jola (University of Surrey): Moved by Dance: Visually or
                              Kinaesthetically or What?
17:00 – 17:15     Guido Orgs (University College London): Commentary on
                              “Moved by Dance: Visually or Kinaesthetically or What?”
17:15 – 17:35     Discussion
17:35 – 18:00     Coffee Break
18:00 – 18:45     Claudio Babiloni (Università degli Studi di Foggia): Brains "In Concert":
                              Frontal Oscillatory Alpha Rhythms and Empathy in Professional Musicians
18:45 – 19:00     Joydeep Bhattacharya (Goldsmiths, University of London): 
                              Commentary on “Brains "In Concert": Frontal Oscillatory
                              Alpha Rhythms and Empathy in Professional Musicians”
19:00 – 19:20     Discussion
19:20 – 21:00     Dinner 

September 12, 2017

09:00 – 09:45     Sophia Lycouris (Edinburgh College of Art): Haptic Experiments with
                              Blind Audiences: Kinaesthetic Sensation in Dance beyond the Visual
09:45 – 10:00     Dee Reynolds (University of Manchester): Commentary on
                              “Haptic Experiments with Blind Audiences: Kinaesthetic Sensation in 
                              Dance beyond the Visual”
10:00 – 10:20     Discussion
10:20 – 10:50     Coffee Break
10:50 – 11:35     Jean-Luc Petit (Université Strasbourg): Kinaesthetic Co-Constitution as a
                              Framework for a Non-Verbal Gesture Mode of Communication:
                              Orchestra Conducting                              
11:35 – 11:50     Bérangère Thirioux (Charité, Universitätsmedizin Berlin): Commentary
                              on “Kinaesthetic Co-Constitution as a Framework for a Nonverbal,
                              Gesture Mode of Communication”
11:50 – 12:10     Discussion
12:10 – 13:30     Lunch
13:30 – 14:15     Uwe Seifert (Universität zu Köln): Social Cognition, Motor Theories of
                              Mind, and Musical Aisthesis – An Evolutionary Framework for Investigating
                              the Functional Architecture of the Musical Mind
14:15 – 14:30     Wolfgang Detel (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt):
                              Commentary on "Social Cognition, Motor Theories of Mind, and
                              Musical Aisthesis – An Evolutionary Framework for Investigating the 
                              Functional Architecture of the Musical Mind"
14:30 – 14:50     Discussion
14:50 – 15:20     Closing Discussion

September 11, 2017

13:00 – 14:00     Lunch
14:00 – 14:30     Jin Hyun Kim (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg): Opening Address
14:30 – 15:15     Valeria Gazzola (University of Groningen): The Kinaesthetic Side
                              of Empathy
15:15 – 15:30     Bérangère Thirioux (Charité, Universitätsmedizin Berlin):
                              Commentary on “The Kinaesthetic Side of Empathy“
15:30 – 15:50     Discussion
15:50 – 16:15     Coffee Break
16:15 – 17:00     Corinne Jola (University of Surrey): Moved by Dance: Visually or
                              Kinaesthetically or What?
17:00 – 17:15     Guido Orgs (University Colleg London): Commentary on “Moved 
                              by Dance: Visually or Kinaesthetically or What?”
17:15 – 17:35     Discussion
17:35 – 18:00     Coffee Break
18:00 – 18:45     Claudio Babiloni (Università degli Studi di Foggia): Brains "In Concert":
                              Frontal Oscillatory Alpha Rhythms and Empathy in Professional Musicians
18:45 – 19:00     Joydeep Bhattacharya (Goldsmiths, University of London):
                              Commentary on “Brains "In Concert": Frontal Oscillatory
                              Alpha Rhythms and Empathy in Professional Musicians
19:00 – 19:20     Discussion
19:20 – 21:00     Dinner 

September 12, 2017

09:00 – 09:45     Sophia Lycouris (Edinburgh College of Art): Haptic Experiments with
                              Blind Audiences: Kinaesthetic Sensation in Dance beyond the Visual
09:45 – 10:00     Dee Reynolds (University of Manchester): Commentary on
                              “Haptic Experiments with Blind Audiences: Kinaesthetic Sensation
                               in Dance beyond the Visual”
10:00 – 10:20     Discussion
10:20 – 10:50     Coffee Break
10:50 – 11:35     Jean-Luc Petit (Université Strasbourg): Kinaesthetic Co-Constitution as a
                              Framework for a Non-Verbal Gesture Mode of Communication:
                              Orchestra Conducting
11:35 – 11:50     Bérangère Thirioux (Charité, Universitätsmedizin Berlin): Commentary
                              on “Kinaesthetic Co-Constitution as a Framework for a Nonverbal,
                              Gesture Mode of Communication”
11:50 – 12:10     Discussion
12:10 – 13:30     Lunch
13:30 – 14:15     Uwe Seifert (Universität zu Köln): Social Cognition, Motor Theories of 
                              Mind, and Musical Aisthesis – An Evolutionary Framework for Investigating
                              the Functional Architecture of the Musical Mind
14:15 – 14:30     Wolfgang Detel (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt):
                              Commentary on "Social Cognition, Motor Theories of Mind, and
                              Musical Aisthesis – An Evolutionary Framework for Investigating the 
                              Functional Architecture of the Musical Mind"
14:30 – 14:50     Discussion
14:50 – 15:20     Closing Discussion