Youn Kim – författare

The presence of the phenomenological body is central to music in all of its varieties and contradictions. With the explosion of scholarly works on the body in virtually every field in the humanities, the social as well as the biomedical sciences, the question of how such a complex understanding of the body is related to music, with its own complexity, has been investigated within specific disciplinary perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body brings together scholars from across these fields, providing a platform for the discussion of the multidimensional interfaces of music and the body. The book is organized into six sections, each discussing a topic that defines the field: the moving and performing body; the musical brain and psyche; embodied mind, embodied rhythm; the disabled and sexual body; music as medicine; and the multimodal body. Connecting a wide array of diverse perspectives and presenting a survey of research and practice, the Handbook provides an introduction into the rich world of music and the body.

Our understanding of music is inherently metaphorical, and metaphoricity pervades all sorts of musical discourses, be they theoretical, analytical, philosophical, pedagogical, or even scientific. The notions of "body" and "force" are the two most pervasive and comprehensive scientific metaphors in musical discourse. Throughout various intertwined contexts in history, the body–force pair manifests multiple layers of ideological frameworks and permits the conceptualization of music in a variety of ways. Youn Kim investigates these concepts of body and force in the emerging field of music psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The field’s discursive space spans diverse contexts, including psychological theories of auditory perception and cognition, pedagogical theories on the performer’s bodily mechanism, speculative and practical theories of musical rhythm, and aesthetical discussion of the power of music. This investigation of body and force aims to illuminate not just the past scene of music psychology but also the notions of music that are being constructed at present.