Rethinking Philosophy, Re-Viewing Musical-Emotional Experiences (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Varieties of Musical Experience
2015
Many philosophers of music, especially within the analytic tradition, are essentialists with respect to musical experience. That is, they view their goal as that of isolating the essential set of features constitutive of the experience of music, qua music. Toward this end, they eliminate every element that would appear to be unnecessary for one to experience music as such. In doing so, they limit their analysis to the experience of a silent, motionless individual who listens with rapt attention to the sounds produced by either musicians a on stage, a stereo, or a portable device. This approach is illustrated in recent work by Nick Zangwill. Drawing on essentialist assumptions, Zangwill concludes that properly musical experience is effectively disembodied and radically private. While this seems plausible when we consider the essentialists’ paradigm case, Zangwill’s conclusion seems odd once we consider the wide variety of ways that people experience music. One’s body and social situation seem ineluctably enmeshed within the experience of, e.g., hot jazz played in a nightclub, where listeners bob their heads and dance to the music, cheer on the musicians, and socialize with their fellow concertgoers. The question this paper aims to answer is: should we consider this and similar experiences of music properly “musical”? I maintain that we should. Far from the world of pure music that Zangwill and others relegate properly musical experience, I conclude that our musical experiences are fully enmeshed within the somatic, affective, and interpersonal dimensions of human life.
Music Listening as Musicking and Strong Musical Experience
SOCIETY. INTEGRATION. EDUCATION. Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference
Research about musical experience can be found in various works written about the experience of joy felt from music listening or seeing visual art. Gabrielsson and Lindström gathered and analysed more than 1000 case descriptions over a period of ten years, in which participants were asked to describe in as much detail as possible the most powerful and most impressive musical experiences they had ever had. References to such musical experiences in literature are not rare, however they are related to a variety of results – involving demographics, geography, environment, etc. The author conducted a phenomenological analysis as a subjective psychological aspect’s research method of musical experience, where music listening and musical experience ‘goes together’ with musicking.
Understanding our experience of music: What kind of psychology do we need?
Musicae Scientiae, 2006
Background in the psychology of music The historical development of the psychology of music largely followed that of psychology in general. In the 20th century it adopted the research methods and interests of cognitive psychology and more recently has turned to new interdisciplinary connections with psychobiology and the neurosciences. There remains, however, a certain inadequacy regarding work in the psychology of music and cultural psychology and as well of interpretative research aimed at interpreting the role of music in those processes, processes Bruner called “the nature and cultural shaping of meaning-making, and the central place it plays in human action”. Background in historical musicology and cultural anthropology Historical musicology and cultural anthropology maintain that experiencing and understanding music represents a process fundamentally dependent upon cultural context. This begs the question as to how cultural context influences social and individual representati...
Strong Experiences with Music: Music is Much More than Just Music: A Review Essay
International Journal of Education and the Arts, 2013
The objects of Alf Gabrielsson's study Strong experiences with music are experiences and insights that exceed by far what is normally included in music experiences. To a great extent, the many (over 500) experiences related in this book are so intense that a reader often cannot avoid comparing them to her or his own experiences with music. The multi-variety of character in music experiences is viewed in relation to their dependence on a large number of both musical, personal, and situational variables. With its rare combination of the richness of accounts of extraordinary experiences, the sympathetic understanding and interpretation that characterizes the reflective commentary, and its thoughtful and cautious scientific analysis, this book provides a most powerful illustration of the profundity of the question what music may do to us. (Less)
Music in Human Experience: Perspectives on a Musical Species (Sample)
Edited Collection, 2022
Music plays an integral role in many facets of human life, from the biological and social to the spiritual and political. This book brings together interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies on the functions, purposes, and meanings of music in human experience. CONTRIBUTORS: Simha Arom; Steven Brown; John Collins; Ellen Dissanayake; Jonathan L. Friedmann; Victor Grauer; Joseph Jordania; Robert Lopez-Hanshaw; John Morton; Michael Naylor; Bruno Nettl; Elizabeth Phillips; Piotr Podlipniak; Michelle Scalise Sugiyama; Nino Tsitsishvili; Agota Vitkay-Kucsera; Maja S. Vukadinović; Alejandra Wah
This book delivers what it promises: it is intended as an introductory textbook to the psychology of music with an emphasis on music cognition. The book contains 250 pages of text, text boxes, illustrations, and a comprehensive subject and author index, as well as audio examples which are available via the internet and iTunes. The strength of the book lies in the overall pedagogical thinking that pervades it. Professor Thompson, now in Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), starts each chapter with a clear learning objective and ends with apt suggestions for further reading. More importantly, the structure of the book does not adopt the usual bottom-up approach that starts with acoustics and the description of the auditory system. Instead it covers recent findings and controversial issues as a way to motivate the readers and make them aware of the " hot buttons " in music psychology (e.g. reductionism to neural processes, nativism, and the ecological validity of experiments). The style of writing is extremely clear and the scientific rationale behind each of the methodologies and research designs is lucidly explained. The book provides a balanced overview of the essential topics in music cognition. Not only are the main findings within each topic summarized, but advice is given about the pitfalls lurking within particular studies and explanations. Moreover, Thompson throws into question the causes of these phenomena and some ideas for further reading. For this reason only, Music, Thought, and Feeling provides also food for thought for readers already well-versed in music cognition. The expertise of the author is not only evident in the cogent way he summarizes the critical issues within the field but also in the sheer number of landmark studies that have been conducted by the author and his collaborators. These actually form the core part of the book and their range is truly diverse: from timing the perception of key changes (with Cuddy, 1997), through cross-cultural exploration of emotions and music (with Balkwill, 1999) to the integration of visual aspects of performance to the musical experience (with Graham & Russo, 2005). A total of 80 sound excerpts are available online that have been either created for this book or are shared by various researchers and musicians for this purpose. 29 complete music tracks are available via iTunes, where one can listen to the previews and purchase the songs separately. In sum, the sound examples are a particularly inspiring aspect of the book: They represent a variety of musical styles — from hiphop and rock classics to a group of Calabrian women singing to a child, as well as the usual Shepard and scale illusions — and all are explained in sufficient detail within the pages of the book. Online resources could have been utilized more
2019
This dissertation engages the questions and methodologies of phenomenology, the philosophy of culture, the philosophy of music and ethnomusicology in order to investigate the significance of music in human life. The systematic orientation of Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms provides the overarching framework that positions the approach in chapter one. Following Cassirer, art in general and music in particular are not regarded as enjoyable yet dispensable pastimes, but rather as fundamental ways of experiencing the world as intuitive forms and sensations. Establishing the ontological significance of music entails unpacking the sui generis experience of time, space and subjectivity that characterize the musical experience.
MUSIC AND EMOTION: AN EMPIRICAL CRITIQUE OF A KEY ISSUE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC
2007
The crux of much of the debate in the aesthetics of music has been the relationship of (instrumental) music and emotion, and specifically the issues of expression and induction of emotion by music. Kivy (e.g., 1989Kivy (e.g., , 1990Kivy (e.g., , 1999 has addressed these issues influentially, in part by means of the "emotivist" versus "cognitivist" dichotomy. A related topic has been the comparison of "musical emotions" to those that arise in the non-musical "real world." The aims of the paper are to show that some of the most important claims by the contemporary philosophers of music are empirically testable; to review some of the recent experimental work; and to demonstrate how such methodological and empirical advances can render certain aspects of the philosophical commentary obsolete. The paper concludes with the attempt to replace the concept of "musical emotions" by those of the measurable responses of "thrills/chills," "being moved" and "aesthetic awe" -all of these states being hierarchically related components in the Aesthetic Trinity theory (Konečni