Beyond Text and Performance: Archaeoacoustics, Material Engagement, and 4E Cognition in Medieval Liturgical Music

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Research Question/Problem

Contemporary musicological debate often tends to oppose historical-textual analysis to performance studies, thereby generating a false dichotomy between the work as an ideal object and performance as an ephemeral event. This paper argues that such a division is ontologically and cognitively misleading. Music exists neither as a “disembodied event” nor as a “placeless text”. The central problem, therefore, lies in integrating formal analysis with the phenomenological, embodied, and material reality of musical experience. The evolution of the sung Christian rite demonstrates that structural transformations were not merely abstract aesthetic choices, but enactive responses to radical environmental changes.

Objectives

This study aims to:

1. Demonstrate the interdependence of text and performance through the framework of 4E Cognition (Gallagher, 2023) and Extended and Situated Affectivity (Colombetti, 2014).
2. Analyze how the architectural transition from the domus ecclesiae to the monumental basilica shaped the development of forms such as tropes, sequences, and later polyphony.
3. Propose a conception of architecture and environment as an “extended body” and a scaffolding device actively involved in musical sense-making processes.

Results / Main contributions

Through the analysis of physical acoustic parameters such as Reverberation Time (T₃₀) and Speech Transmission Index (STI), this study shows that the “acoustic trauma” produced by the transition from the domus ecclesiae to large basilicas had a significant impact on the aesthetic and emotional experience of the Christian rite. This transformation can be interpreted as a shift in the co-constitutive dynamics between mind, body, and matter, in line with Malafouris’s (2013) Material Engagement Theory. The architectural environment did not function as a passive container of sound, but as a structuring agent that modulated perception, temporality, and collective performance dynamics. As a result, the adaptation of medieval liturgical compositions (from the amplification of melismatic writing to early polyphonic elaborations) can be understood as an enactive response to a transformed acoustic ecosystem. Architecture thus emerges as an interactive partner in participatory musical sense-making.

Conclusions / Implications

The presumed dichotomy between traditional musicology and performance studies dissolves once bodies and environments are recognized as constitutive elements of musical history itself. The evolution of medieval liturgical music can be interpreted as a paradigmatic case of extended cognition: musical cognition is distributed among the singers (participatory sense-making) and extends into architectural materiality (material engagement).

This perspective carries significant methodological and pedagogical implications. Studying or interpreting music outside its original acoustic ecosystem risks depriving it of a fundamental dimension of its cognitive ontology.