Music as an open-ended artefact. Redefining musicality through Extended Mind and Material Engagement Theory

This study re-examines music and musicality through the perspectives of the extended mind and creative evolution. It moves beyond traditional, fixed ideas of musical artworks, proposing instead that music is an incomplete artefact. Here, human evolution is seen as a dynamic interplay of mind, body, and the tools and instruments we create. These aren't just aids for immediate tasks; they're integral to our biological, cultural, and evolutionary history. Within this framework, music is conceptualized as an incomplete artefact: a form whose inherent openness, rather than being a limitation, is precisely what enables unique and emergent experiences through active engagement. This framework also emphasizes the pivotal, yet frequently disregarded, role of both the performer and the listener in the collaborative creation of musical sense-making. While a musical composition retains a recognizable, underlying structure the personal contribution of the performer is vital. The interpretative choices of the performers, the actions they embody, and the situated interactions they engage in ensure that each rendition transcends mere replication, generating a distinct experience on each occasion, even in the presence of detailed notational instructions. Moreover, the listener’s engagement introduces an additional layer of variability, whereby perceptions of the same composition can vary considerably over time. This is influenced by personal memory, current emotional states, and evolving contexts. This renders each act of listening a peculiar, unpredictable, and perpetually novel encounter with the musical form. This inherent variability positions music as a quintessential open-ended artifact: it possesses a discernible form and structure, yet it is never entirely fixed or fully determined, akin to a vessel that has been molded but remains unfired, awaiting the transformative heat of performance and reception. By focusing on music’s processual nature and its continuous becoming, the paper advocates for a radical reconceptualization of musicality. It argues that musicality is not merely a cognitive capacity or an inherent quality of a static artwork, but rather an extended practice, a situated, relational, and continuously evolving phenomenon that emerges from the dynamic interplay between human minds, bodies, and their material environment. This perspective underscores music’s profound implications for understanding agency, distributed cognition, and the aesthetic dimension of our embodied existence.