Language, Vision & Music

What common cognitive patterns underlie our competence in these disparate modes of thought? Language (natural & formal), vision and music seem to share at least the following attributes: a hierarchical organisation of constituents, recursivity, metaphor, the possibility of self-reference, ambiguity, and systematicity. Can we propose the existence of a general symbol system with instantiations in these three modes or is the only commonality to be found at the level of such entities as cerebral columnar automata? Also, we invite papers which examine cross-cultural experience of these modalities.

Topics Include:

• Combinations: language and music; language and vision; music and vision.
• What can Engineering of software platforms (e.g. AAU CHAMELEON; cf. http://www.cpk.auc.dk/imm) for integrated Intelligent MultiMedia processing of language/vision/etc. tell us?
• Metaphor: For example: the use of terms like "interval"
  and "range" in music.
• Rhythm: How is Rhythm important for language, vision and music?
• Acoustics: What role does it play in the three modalities?
• The roles of embodiment  and culture in  the formation of symbolic apparatus;  For example:   the   use   of  gesture  in face-to-face communication.
• Emotions: what role do they play in the three modalities?
• Synesthesia
• What the visual, musical and linguistic arts can tell us.
• What is the developmental  relationship between prosody and music?
• What  is the  cognitive  evidence  for   the  dependence of music   on language?
• Can we speak meaningfully about a semantics of music?
• Architectures for integration of language, vision and music; what aspects are conscious and what automatic? What aspects are common and what are specific to each?
• What is the role of modelling creativity?
  Are the creative processes similar or in what way are they different?

Special Session On Creativity

In AI we have failed to get much handle on creativity. Conn Mulvihill will Chair a special session on creativity looking at writing, poetry, painting, and music composition. There are those that claim that music is central to any hope of understanding Joyce. We think also of the likes of Kandinsky here. Is Joyce prose or music? Is Kandinsky art or music? What are the links between language, vision and music? Is creativity the same for each? And, by the way, what is creativity?

(cf. http://www.futurehum.uib.no/ & http://tn-speech.wrangler.essex.ac.uk/tn-speech/ & http://www.cpk.auc.dk/imm)