Musings on music making and listening: supervisory control and virtual reality

This paper offers two perspectives on the relation between music and supervisory control. The first is that music making can be viewed as a three-level hierarchy of control and feedback interactions. The top level is the composer or conductor interacting through hand and auditory signals with the musician´s conscious (higher brain level) activity. The mid level is internal to the musician, the higher brain centers interacting with the musician´s subconscious neuromuscular activity. The lowest level is the musician´s neuromuscular system interacting with the musical instrument. At each level there are constraints that are discussed in the paper. A second perspective refers to a phenomenon of music listening, its capability to engender a sense of virtual reality (or virtual presence) in much the same way that observing a computer-generated visual scene can make an observer feel present in a place other than where he or she is physically located.