“Poetry puts intent into words; singing lengthens words”—one of the earliest Chinese comments on artistic expression. Poetic language extends the reach of a sentiment beyond the individual, and musicality extends the reach of poetic language, not only across a room, but across geography and generations. The “extended mind thesis” (EMT) views minds as extending beyond individual nervous systems to include material and social environments. If you and I together can recall the full lyrics to a song neither of us could remember individually, we participate in and “extend” one another’s cognition, just as inanimate aids, like tuning forks and written notations, enable thoughts and performances impossible without “leaning on the world,” as philosopher Andy Clark puts it. Even as it valorizes textual authority, the Chinese tradition prized the oral stratum as source of novel, authentic musical-poetic expression. With reference to theories like EMT and memory “chunking,” Schoenberger’s monograph, The Voice Extended: Music, Mind, and Language in Chinese Poetry and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2024), fills in missing parts of cyclical, continuous interactions between social minds and material artifacts in ways that explain not only the trajectory of Chinese arts, but also more general phenomena, like vernacularization and improvisation.

Speaker

Casey Schoenberger completed his PhD in Chinese literature at Yale University in 2013. For five years, he served as Assistant Professor of Chinese Culture at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he taught beginning and advanced courses to local and international students in English and in Mandarin. He is currently a lecturer in Rice University’s Department of Transnational Asian Studies. His research and teaching focus on cognitive, comparative, digital, musicological, and linguistic approaches to East Asian literature and performing arts.