is the technology by which the human body, and consequently also the human mind, can be given an extension in the digital musical domain. How it is distinct from (disembodied) music cognition Cartesian dualism had a tremendous impact on cognitive science and in particular on cognitive musicology. Influenced by Gestalt psychology, music cognition research of the last decades of the 20th Century was mainly focusing on the perception of structure, that is, the perception of pitch, melody, rhythm, harmony and tonality. It considered music perception as a faculty on its own, completely dissociated from musical action. Instead, in studies on embodied musical activity (such as listening and music performance), subjects are invited to actively engage in the signification process. This engagement is articulated by means of corporeal expression which can be measured, analyzed, modelled and related to the musical stimulus. René Descartes' idea that mental activity is of a separate order from body movement is refuted and, in fact reversed. How it is distinct from traditional musicology The difference with the traditional phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to musical meaning formation is that embodied music cognition has a focus on an empirical and evidence-based methodology, rather than on subjective first-person descriptions. Embodied music cognition aims at giving a full account of the subjective involvement by taking into account the role of the social-cultural context, subjective background (involving gender, age, familiarity with music, degree of music education). Embodied music cognition adopts a scientific methodology but its aim is not to reduce music to physics, nor to reduce gesture and embodied meaning to the biomechanics of the human body. Instead, embodied music cognition fully recognizes the contribution of all mental and bodily systems including subjective feelings, emotions and coinaesthetic (or body image) awareness. See also Embodied cognition Music psychology Musical gesture Music philosophy Music therapy Further reading Godøy, Rolf, y Marc Leman, eds. (2010). Musical gestures : sound, movement, and meaning, New York: Routledge. Leman, Marc (2007). Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. López Cano, Rubén (2003). “Setting the body in music. Gesture, Schemata and Stylistic-Cognitive Types”. International Conference on Music and Gesture University of East Anglia 28–31 August 2003. (available on line) López Cano, Rubén (2006). “What kind of affordances are musical affordances? A semiotic approach”. Paper presented at L’ascolto musicale: condotte, pratiche, grammatiche. Bologna 23–25 February 2006. (available on line) López Cano, Rubén (2008). “Che tipo di