Musica audiotattile e musica di tradizione orale

Abstract. With the aim to provide jazz, rock and contemporary popular music with an aesthetic systematization, the author outlines a phenomenological distinction between types of music based on oral tradition and those (jazz, rock, pop) that he defines as “audiotactile”. Starting from the observation that, in both these complex linguistic systems, phenomenal production and symbolic musical representation are mediated by the Audio-Tactile Principle (ATP), by means of argumentations based on aesthetics, socio-anthropology, and cognitive science, ATP’s fundamental features are singled out resorting to McLuhan’s concept of medium, which is also explained through the notion of “channel”, based upon classic communication’s model. ATP is meant as a broad somatic and cognitive interface capable of mediating musical experience and, as such, of deeply affecting it through its peculiarities and epistemological features. Therefore, audio-tactile music stands out from the type of music that has its institutive medium in written notation, such as common practice music. The pattern based on ATP is, however, a musical and phenomenological poietic pattern, which also concerns the music of traditional cultures. In order to obtain the specific peculiarity typical of real audio-tactile types of music, it is also necessary to avail oneself of the cultural implications of the phonographic recording/reproduction (PhRR) medium. The mediation of this particular factor reintroduces into a processual and événementielle ATP-pervaded phenomenology some typical connotations of a communication’s model in culture based on a written text, which are the fruit of an object-ontology that causes a product to prevail over a process. The message that has been fixed and codified through the aesthetic phenomenon introduced by the PhRR medium and that the author defines as Neoauratic EncCoding (NAE) – thus creating the conditions to uphold the connotations of creative subjectivity, originality, “work”, transformation of the aesthetic norm, all unknown to oral cultures – actually brings about the aesthetic and phenomenological background from which the forms of contemporary audio-tactile types of music stand out.