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Abstract

This paper is an exploration of how we do things with music—that is, the way that we use music as an “esthetic technology” to enact micro-practices of emotion regulation, communicative expression, identity construction, and interpersonal coordination that drive core aspects of our emotional and social existence. The main thesis is: from birth, music is directly perceived as an affordance-laden structure. Music, I argue, affords a sonic world, an exploratory space or “nested acoustic environment” that further affords possibilities for, among other things, (1) emotion regulation and (2) social coordination. When we do things with music, we are engaged in the work of creating and cultivating the self, as well as creating and cultivating a shared world that we inhabit with others. I develop this thesis by first introducing the notion of a “musical affordance”. Next, I look at how “emotional affordances” in music are exploited to construct and regulate emotions. I summon empirical research on neonate music therapy to argue that this is something we emerge from the womb knowing how to do. I then look at “social affordances” in music, arguing that joint attention to social affordances in music alters how music is both perceived and appropriated by joint attenders within social listening contexts. In support, I describe the experience of listening to and engaging with music in a live concert setting. Thinking of music as an affordance-laden structure thus reaffirms the crucial role that music plays in constructing and regulating emotional and social experiences in everyday life.

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Notes

  1. I am grateful for constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper provided by audiences in Copenhagen and Durham. Thomas Cochrane and Anders Thingmand Henriksen offered exceedingly valuable commentary on an earlier draft. Finally, I am very grateful for the critical feedback of two anonymous reviewers.

  2. One reviewer questioned the necessity of responding to such an obviously mistaken view as Pinker’s. While I do think that Pinker is quite wrong on this point (for reasons I develop below), it is not at all clear to me that everyone would agree. For example, the fact that music perception, as well as the relation between emotion and music, has only recently (i.e., within the past few decades) begun to receive considerable attention in psychology and neuroscience might be taken to suggest that other scientists have, at least until recently, implicitly shared this bias. Additionally, there is a benefit to spelling out as carefully as possible why, exactly, Pinker is mistaken on this point—even if many of us would already agree that he most certainly is.

  3. There are a few exceptions. See DeNora (2000) and Clarke (2005).

  4. Gibson, too, seems to hold this view. He writes that, “an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective–objective and helps us understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer” (Gibson 1979, p. 129). But this statement confuses as much as it clarifies; and it potentially contradicts the previous quote. For criticism of Gibson on this point, see Katz (1987) and Costall (1986). For an attempt to clarify Gibson’s view and offer an updated view of affordances as properties of animal–environment relations, see Chemero (2003) and Stoffregen (2003).

  5. As we will see below, the requisite skills fall upon a continuum. Neonates and infants posses some of the basic perceptual and affective sensitivities needed to experience music as an affordance-laden structure. But the musical skills of a neonate are, of course, clearly impoverished compared to those of a musically experienced adult. Like any other skill, music perception can mature, becoming more polished and refined as our perceptual and affective sensitivities develop with age and experience. Additionally, as we age, our listening skills deepen and become more robust in that we become capable of making certain environmental (i.e., historical−cultural) associations with particular sorts of music or musical sounds. For instance, a particular song might trigger a flood of high-school memories for one listener but not the other (e.g., perhaps the second listener is younger, and only knows the song as a retro hit from years gone by). Or, the quality of a particular musical sound, such as the ferocious distortion present in many of Hendrix’s guitar solos, might summon vivid images of the free love 1960s, drug experimentation, and political activism for those who first heard these solos in their original historical context. But as the examples discussed throughout the paper will show, these associations need not be present for listeners to respond to music in an active and emotionally sensitive way. I am grateful to both anonymous referees for pressing this point albeit in somewhat different ways.

  6. This is a controversial point. Jerrold Levinson (2005), for instance, argues that appreciating some of the actions leading to the production of a particular musical sound (e.g., the abrupt arm motion preceding a cymbal’s crash or the gestural dynamics of playing the violin) is a major factor in shaping our appreciation of emotional qualities in music. And surely there are instances where listening in a neutral way may detract from a deeper appreciation of certain esthetic qualities in music. Our experience of listening to the music of a marching band or a song at a live rock concert, for instance, may be somewhat blunted without a simultaneous experiential awareness of the vivid actions and interpersonal coordination that produces that music. However, my point is simply that our normal way of listening to music—again, in a sensitive and attentive way, as I stipulate below—is to listen in a relatively transparent way. Moreover, given that young children and possibly even some nonhuman animal are capable of listening “deeply” and responding to expressive qualities in music without appreciating the actions or circumstances that led to the creation of the music, the transparency thesis seems relatively plausible. Thanks to Tom Cochrane and an anonymous reviewer for pressing me here.

  7. So, I both agree and disagree with Roger Scruton on this point. In The Aesthetics of Music, Scruton writes that, “we spontaneously detach the sound from the circumstances of its production, and attend to it as it is in itself...The history of music illustrates the attempt to find a way of describing, notating, and therefore identifying sound, without specifying a cause to them” (Scruton 1997, pp. 2–3). I think this gets the phenomenology of our everyday music listening correct. However, Scruton continues later: “The person who listens to sounds, and hears them as music, is not seeking in them for information about their cause, or clues as to what is happening. On the contrary, he is hearing the sounds apart from the material world. They are detached in his perception, and understood in terms of their experienced order...” (Scruton 1997, p. 221). With these remarks, Scruton pushes the “transparency” thesis too far. As I will argue below, features of a musical piece heard as a sonic world are shaped by the environment in which the piece is experienced. In other terms, music listening is always embedded—and features of a piece’s embeddedness within a particular music-listening episode play a role in shaping how the music is experienced by the listener, especially when other listeners are present. Thus, just because transparent listening involves hearing the music as divorced from the material circumstances of its production, it does not follow that we necessarily hear the music as divorced from the material world as a whole. More on this below. For some other objections to Scruton on this latter point, see Hamilton (2007).

  8. The discussion that follows is very much indebted to DeNora (2000).

  9. “Ambient noise” is here understood to be the totality of noises in a perceiver’s environment that are present but not selectively chosen (Wagner 1994).

  10. For such a review, see Standley (2001).

  11. Similarly, Trevarthen and Malloch write that “music is therapeutic because it attunes to the essential efforts that the mind makes to regulate the body, both in its inner neurochemical, hormonal, and metabolic processes, and in its purposeful engagements with the objects of the world, and with other people” (Trevarthen and Malloch 2000, p. 11).

  12. See Malloch and Trevarthen (2009) for a collection of papers dedicated to this topic. See also Bunt and Pavlicevic (2001, pp. 193–194).

  13. Consonant intervals are stable (i.e., pleasant-sounding) and require no resolution. Dissonant intervals, on the other hand, exhibit a “tense” quality that requires resolution to a constant interval.

  14. Instead of simply playing bare notes for the infant, a second experiment modified a Mozart minuet to produce different versions with predominantly consonant or dissonant intervals, which was then played to the infant.

  15. There is evidence that some nonhuman animals, too, know how to do things with music. See e.g., Patel et al. (2009).

  16. This is not to imply that all causal judgments necessarily require concepts.

  17. Jessica Philips-Silver and Laurel Trainor found that bodily movement influences auditory encoding of rhythm patterns in both infants and adults (Philips-Silver and Trainor 2005, 2007). For further discussion and analysis of how bodily movement shapes or “enacts” the character and content of musical experience, see Krueger (2009).

  18. By “invariants”, I mean the structural features of the music that specify an array of possible perceptual interactions. These invariants guide the infant’s perceptual exploration of a piece—they fix a certain range of possibilities, and open up specific valences of exploration—but they simultaneously leave open array of possible engagements. For instance, as a perceiver matures (both physiologically and experientially) and becomes more esthetically sophisticated, she may pick up on and respond to features of a familiar piece that eluded her during past listening episodes (in addition, as discussed earlier, to picking up various cultural and historical associations only possible with age and experience). She learns to hear a piece with “fresh ears”.

  19. This tension–resolution dialectic, which plays with our sonic expectancies (e.g., we anticipate that a dissonant interval will be resolved by a consonant interval), is surely one of the most appealing and viscerally primitive aspects of musical experience for all ages. So, it is no surprise that infants would also find rudimentary forms of this dialectic esthetically interesting and pleasurable.

  20. Colwyn Trevarthen (1999, Trevarthen and Malloch 2000) reports a vivid example of this sort of sensorimotor engagement. He describes a 5-month-old baby, born blind, who “without prompting or training, and, indeed without her mother being aware of her graceful rhythmic gestures, conducts portions of the melodies of famous Swedish baby songs...with her left arm and hand” (Trevarthen and Malloch 2000, p. 13). Trevarthen describes how the infant’s arms rise and hands widen when the swelling of the song intensifies, and how her hands suddenly close and drop when the stanza concludes. Presumably, the infant experientially feels that the dynamic qualities of the music (e.g., textures and patterns) afford this sort of active engagement, and that her esthetic appreciation of the music is deepened via this intimate sort of “bodily listening”. Trevarthen notes that, “Microanalysis of the video reveals a marvelous instinctive performance of transmodal musicality, which suggests that the infant is making an original performance with parts of her body she has never seen” (Trevarthen and Malloch 2000, p. 14).

  21. To be clear, one of the main points of this section is that the emotional affordances discussed previously are intersubjectively accessible. They can be exploited by multiple perceivers, and thus shape these perceiver’s shared experiences of a piece of music. So, the emotional and social aspects of a musical affordance are just that: aspects of the same musical affordances.

  22. Tom Cochrane’s (2009) excellent discussion of joint attention and musical experience goes well beyond what is possible here.

  23. Joint attention is also said to make possible the later development of linguistic communication (Bruner 1977), as well as the ability to assume a reflective stance on the world, as opposed to simply being practically immersed in it (Werner and Kaplan 1963).

  24. This awareness need not be, and generally speaking is not, an explicit attending to others as an additional object (i.e., as an object of experience alongside the music, for instance). Rather than being the target of an explicit process of monitoring, the Other instead serves as a kind of phenomenal filter or framework through which explicit objects of attention (e.g., the musical piece) are given. I trust that the descriptions provided make this distinction sufficiently clear.

  25. For more on the spatial and kinesthetic aspects of music perception, see Krueger (2009).

  26. This sort of experience is not necessarily shared, since some listeners (i.e., musicians, musically experienced listeners, etc.) will likely be attuned to subtle sound features that elude others. Nevertheless, research indicates a convergence of responsiveness to the emotional content of music (e.g., Fritz et al. 2009), that is, a common tendency to “read” the expressive content of music in a similar way. This fact further explains why the phenomenon of emotional contagion is so prevalent within live music contexts.

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Correspondence to Joel W. Krueger.

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Krueger, J.W. Doing things with music. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 1–22 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9152-4

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