Lost and found in music: Music,consciousness and subjectivity

Introduction

In the third poem of his Four Quartets, entitled “The Dry Salvages,” T. S. Eliot (1943) famously writes of “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.” And in a passage from his autobiographical book entitled Lost in Music, Giles Smith (1995, p. 40) writes vividly of the pleasures of both air-guitar-style, active listening; and of immersive, passive headphone listening, concluding: “There is nothing like pop music for getting you out of yourself; but the opposite and equal truth is, there is nothing like pop for centring you in yourself … listening through headphones, which is even now my favourite way to hear things, to sink into them, sealed off, so that there’s no distraction. At which point, pop was not the soundtrack to your life, it was your life.”

Music, we hardly need reminding, has the capacity to involve people in intense and immersive experiences in which—perhaps paradoxically—they seem both to lose themselves, and to find themselves. In a less anecdotal and more systematic manner, Alf Gabrielsson’s (2011) book Strong Experiences with Music presents a wide sample of compelling evidence for the potentially transformative effects of music. Representing nearly 1000 Swedish participants over 20 years of research, the accounts of strong musical experiences were given in relation to the request to: “Describe in your own words the strongest (most intense, most profound) experience with music that you have ever had. Try to revive it in your mind and describe your experience and reactions in as much detail as you can” (Gabrielsson, 2011, p. 7). Even the headings under which these accounts are organized in the book give a strong sense of the participants’ experiences of “losing and finding” themselves (e.g., “When music takes over”; “Merging with the music”; “Feeling light, floating, leaving one’s body”; “Inner music”; “Music and transcendence”; “Confirmation through music”); and from the extensive compendium of experiences that the book encompasses, the following two specific examples from the chapter “Merging with the music” provide representative and vivid accounts. The first is from a middle-aged man reminiscing about listening to the Led Zeppelin track “Stairway to Heaven” 20 years earlier, in the mid-1970s: “The gentle beginning of the song was just perfect. It was like I belonged to the music, melted in with the notes … The music crawled inside me; or was it me that crawled inside the music? In some way that was all that existed” (Gabrielsson, 2011, p. 80). And the second comes from a middle-aged woman, who recalls listening to a recording of the Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 3: “What happened when I started to listen didn’t feel like a separate physical or mental sensation, more like that every tone corresponded directly with my own state of mind. Starting from the beginning of the first movement, it felt as if I sank all the deeper into a great and universal concentration … I was completely plugged into it, body and soul, and nothing could disturb the wholeness that the music and me consisted of. … [T]hen and there, every part of the music that reached my ears became a part of me, and the first and second movement as a whole—that was me just then … I was inside the music, and the music was inside me. It wasn’t possible to distinguish one from the other” (pp. 85–86).

My aim in presenting these accounts of being “lost and found in music” is to use experiences, or accounts of experiences, such as these to shed a questioning light on the particular way in which emotion has come to occupy a place in our understanding of music, and to suggest a somewhat different, and broader, context. After decades of neglect, the last 20 years have witnessed a dramatic increase of scholarly interest in music and the emotions—as the three International Conferences on Music and Emotion, the 1000-page Handbook of Music and Emotion (Juslin & Sloboda 2010), the special issue of Music Analysis (Spitzer, 2010) devoted to music and emotion, along with many other publications, and television and radio programs collectively demonstrate. There is no question that this has been a very positive development, and one that has rehabilitated a powerful and conspicuous component of musical experience. But there is a danger that the term “emotion” is both too narrow, and perhaps too blunt, to do justice to the wide range of phenomena to which it is increasingly applied.

John Deigh (2010) argues that in philosophical and psychological accounts, the term emotion has swung between affect-centered, corporeal and feeling-oriented approaches on the one hand, and thought-based evaluative judgments on the other, with a number of more recent approaches following Schachter and Singer’s (1962) lead in proposing ways in which these two components might be brought together. As Juslin and Sloboda (2010, p. 9) point out in their introduction to the Handbook of Music and Emotion, “a major problem that has plagued the field of music and emotion is terminological confusion,” and in an effort to introduce a degree of clarity and consensus, the editors requested that all 43 of the contributors to the volume should adhere to the same definitions. Noting that the word affect acts as an umbrella under which a range of other terms are frequently brought together, Juslin and Sloboda (2010, p. 10; see also Juslin, 2013, p. 236) offer the following definition of emotion: “This term is used to refer to a quite brief but intense affective reaction that usually involves a number of sub-components—subjective feeling, physiological arousal, expression, action tendency, and regulation—that are more or less “synchronized.” Emotions focus on specific “objects” and last minutes to a few hours (e.g., happiness, sadness).” Emotions are a significant component of “strong experiences of music”—to use Gabrielsson’s term again—but they certainly do not exhaust them, as is evidenced by the fact that neither of the accounts cited above, nor the characterizations by T. S. Eliot and Giles Smith, make any mention at all of emotional states; and in this article I argue for a more heterogeneous approach, framed within the perspectives of musical consciousness and musical subjectivity, that attempts to bring together perceptual, embodied and emotional components of musical experience, embedded in the ecology of everyday listening. In doing so, I also argue for the importance of paying proper attention to phenomenological qualities of musical experience as a counterbalance to the predominantly behavioral and neuroscientific perspectives that have tended to prevail; and for a more dynamic and animated understanding of musical engagement than the term “emotion” seems sometimes to afford.

Musical consciousness

The idea that music affords two apparently contradictory experiences—both “loss of self” and “the discovery of self”—is a theme that has run through western writings on music for nearly 2500 years (see, e.g., Strunk & Treitler, 1998). Plato and Augustine both wrote of the dangers that listeners might be “lost” to music, and might “rediscover themselves” within it, or find themselves transformed by it, in ways that threatened either the state, in the case of Plato; or their faith, in the case of Augustine. And generalizing somewhat, it could be said that much of the European literature in aesthetics, from Kant to Adorno and beyond, has been preoccupied with why and how it is that music has the capacity to take hold of the human subject, and dissolve, transform or reorganize the sense of self.

I have already used the terms “self” and “subject” as if they were largely overlapping or more or less synonymous, and I now introduce and discuss at greater length a third term, consciousness, that is rather more directly associated with a psychological perspective, and is clearly very close to the kinds of experiences from which this paper started, before coming back to subjectivity (and emotion) at the end of the paper. The term “consciousness” is both powerful and problematic. It is powerful in that it sets out to name and capture something that has been proposed—from René Descartes to Antonio Damasio—as one of the most significant and defining attributes of what it is to be human; but it is problematic because of the way in which the word is used in both more generic and more narrowly specific ways. “Consciousness” is commonly used as a broadly inclusive term, to identify that property that some organisms (such as people) do seem to have; and others (such as earthworms) do not; or to distinguish between one person who does seem to have it; and another person—such as someone in a deep coma—who does not. But we also use “consciousness,” combined with a variety of different adjectives, to identify different kinds, or components, of human experience: visual consciousness, linguistic consciousness, auditory consciousness—and perhaps musical consciousness. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a significant number of definitions of consciousness that highlight these distinctions, of which four are particularly revealing. One definition (number 4a) is broad and general, but confined to an individual: “The totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person’s sense of self or define a person’s identity” (OED, 2013) And a second (number 2) is more explicitly psychological: “The faculty or capacity from which awareness of thought, feeling, and volition and of the external world arises … [T]he aspect of the mind made up of operations which are known to the subject.” A third (number 4c) differentiates the term according to different domains of human experience: “[S]pecifying an area of operation, as moral consciousness, religious consciousness, etc.” And yet another (number 4b) opens the term out beyond the domain of private experience: “Attributed as a collective faculty to an aggregate of people, a period of time, etc.; a set of shared defining ideas and beliefs”—such as the consciousness of the research community of the importance of an agreed definition of emotion.

With such diverse ways in which consciousness might be characterized and understood, is there any agreed basis from which to start? And could such a starting point have something to offer for an understanding of musical consciousness? Is consciousness a single phenomenon, or are there useful distinctions that can be made between generic kinds of consciousness? As considered at greater length elsewhere (Clarke, 2011), both Antonio Damasio (1999) and Gerald Edelman (1989) have drawn a distinction between two very broad categories of consciousness—which Edelman calls primary and higher-order consciousness—that can be applied in productive ways to an understanding of musical consciousness. ¹ Primary consciousness is roughly equivalent to what constitutes a perceiver’s current awareness, or the contents of its perceptual present or working memory, and is an attribute of many living things—certainly higher mammals as well as human beings. It is constituted by a relationship between three fundamental components: first, the manner in which an organism perceives its world, understood as a sensorimotor engagement; second, the distinction between self and non-self; and, third, a fundamental “value system,” as Edelman calls it, that is responsible for the pleasure or distress that the organism experiences in its adaptive and self-sustaining encounters with the environment. Edelman summarizes this three-way relationship in the statement that: “Primary consciousness may thus be briefly described as the result of the ongoing discrimination of present perceptual categorizations by a value-dominated self-nonself memory” (Edelman, 1989, p. 102). A concrete example might be encapsulated by a person’s awareness that “this food looks good to eat.” The identification “this food” denotes a perceptual category with a sensorimotor basis—a substance, or combination of substances, that are identified as “food” on the basis of such sensorimotor attributes as smell, color, graspability, and chewability. And it identifies something that is non-self in nature—something that is not part of the person’s own body. And finally, “looks good to eat” constitutes the adaptively and hedonically positive experience that eating the food promises. “This music sounds great to dance to” might be a musical equivalent, where the phrase captures the fact that the sounds are heard (categorized) as music, are “non-self” in nature, and again promise an adaptively and hedonically positive experience. By contrast “My bowing arm aches” features the same three components, but in this case “my bowing arm” is the perceptual category, the experience relates to the self (my arm) rather than non-self, and is hedonically negative (pain, discomfort).

Figure 1, adapted from Edelman (1989), is a diagrammatic summary of these components and relationships, expressed in terms of the possible brain locations at which these processes are thought to occur. Two things are important to note. First, the incorporation of a self—non-self distinction as a fundamental component means that consciousness necessarily has what might be termed a proprioceptive character (see Peñalba Acitores, 2011). Second, while the examples above have been expressed as if they were internal verbal narratives, this is only for illustrative purposes, and the direct awareness that the examples are intended to illustrate is non-verbal in character. The stream of dynamically changing awareness that constitutes primary consciousness has connected, structured, and relational qualities, but there is none of the reflexive character that the term “narrative” implies in other contexts. Primary consciousness is as available to a three-month-old human infant, or to a dog, as to a language-possessing human adult. As Damasio (1999, p. 191) puts it (with an allusion to T. S. Eliot) in relation to his equivalent term “core consciousness”:

The story contained in the images of core consciousness is not told by some clever homunculus. Nor is the story really told by you as a self because the core you is only born as the story is told, within the story itself. You exist as a mental being when primordial stories are being told, and only then; as long as primordial stories are being told, and only then. You are the music while the music lasts.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Outline representation of the systems involved in Edelman’s primary consciousness (adapted from Edelman, 1989).

So what is primary musical consciousness? As discussed at greater length elsewhere (Clarke, 2005, 2011), I take musical listening to be continuous with our more general engagement with the auditory environment—just as musical performance is continuous with other forms of social and creative human action—and within an ecological perceptual framework I regard “what’s going on, and what to do about it” as a general and fundamental attitude to sound—as to all sources of perceptual information (Clarke, 2012). Listen to Sound Example 1 (see Supplemental Material Section), which presents a recording of a relatively familiar everyday event. ² After a second or two in which it might be unclear what exactly “is going on” (i.e., what this is the sound of), ³ a listener’s primary consciousness of “what’s going on” is of a recognizable set of actions (opening a bag, crunching with the teeth) on recognizable objects (a cellophane bag, corn snacks). What these sounds “mean” is what we hear them as the sounds of, and as in the more general case of our relationship with the environment that we inhabit, there is an intimate and reciprocal relationship between perception and action. These are the sounds of actions, and in turn generally lead to actions, which in turn lead to further perceptual discoveries, and so on. ⁴

In music, “what goes on” are actions and events in a real world (musical actions on musical objects—such as playing instruments, sounding voices, moving bodies); and the actions and events of that virtual world that is the world of musical structures, spaces, motions and transformations; and which in turn engages with the wider real world of human emotions and musical cultures, and much else besides. The consequences of this are discussed at greater length elsewhere (Clarke, 2005; 2012; 2013), and for the purposes of this article I will simply point out that there is complex entanglement between these real and virtual worlds, and it is this (among other things) that people find engaging and fascinating about music—as they also do with films, video games, visual art, fiction, and theatre. As an example, consider the track “Deer Stop” by the band Goldfrapp from their album released in 2000 entitled Felt Mountain. ⁵ The track exemplifies many of these attributes—the sound of Alison Goldfrapp’s (real) voice, the (virtual) spaces that she seems to inhabit, the harmonic and rhythmic structures that these sounds specify, the states of mind that they seems to be the sounds of, and body or bodies from which they seem to come, and so on.

Ecological perceptual principles provide a productive way to understand how and why these attributes play such a powerful role in primary musical consciousness, but what any individual listener experiences is of course a consequence of their own previous experiences, predispositions, listening skills, and so on—as the mutualism of the ecological outlook makes quite explicit. So rather than appearing to prescribe what a listener may or may not experience when she or he hears this track, let me refer instead to an example from Ruth Herbert’s book Everyday Music Listening (Herbert, 2011), which is filled with vivid accounts of people’s everyday listening experiences. Here is one of Herbert’s participants—‘Max’—listening to the radio in the bath:

One of his [John Taverner’s] masses for a cappella choir comes on next. Utterly transported by never ending rising and falling of long drawn out polyphony, purity of human voices only. Eyes closed moment … aware of monochromatic colourless textures—little variation or contrast but beauty in voices in cathedral acoustic—endless phrases washing around. Partly conscious of how Latin words are mostly soft vowel sounds. Totally transported to choirboy days and how it felt to sing in a grand setting. Filmic images of candlelight & shadows, monastic/liturgical rituals and so on … attention very much inwards. (Herbert, 2011, p. 71)

Notice the intertwining of detailed sonic characteristics (Latin vowel sounds, colorless textures, pure voices) with real and virtual spaces and motions (the cathedral acoustic, rising and falling polyphony, voices washing around), and musical cultures (chorister culture, liturgical rituals)—all apparently specified in the sounds that this listener hears.

But can all of these complex attributes—described (in this case) quite explicitly in the language of this informant’s listening diary—really be considered properties of primary musical consciousness? Are they not a manifestation of that self-reflective and essentially language-based (or perhaps more broadly semiotic) awareness of ourselves in relationship to our circumstances that we might call self-consciousness—or in Edelman’s terminology higher-order consciousness? There is an unavoidable logical problem in trying to capture in language (both in this discussion, and in the diary extract that Herbert’s informant provided) a phenomenon—primary consciousness—that is specifically characterized as pre or non-linguistic. Other than maintaining a respectful but unhelpful silence on the matter, there is little option but to acknowledge that what Max is trying to convey in his account has inevitably been shaped and in some sense constituted by language and higher-order consciousness as a consequence of the wish to record and communicate his listening; but that it is an attempt to capture a tangle of primary and higher-order experiences. Edelman (1989, p. 104) asserts that “Because human beings have higher-order consciousness, they cannot subjectively experience or reconstruct primary consciousness without the intrusion of some additional components of direct awareness and higher-order consciousness.” The intrusion of language and the other reflective trappings of higher-order consciousness, once acquired, do indeed seem hard or impossible to silence—but it seems unwarranted to take that further to the claim that primary (musical) consciousness is rendered entirely unavailable by the overlay of higher-order consciousness. In different ways, a whole range of psychologists and philosophers (including Bateson, 1972; Clark, 1997; Heft, 2001; Merleau-Ponty, 2005; Piaget, 1970; Stuart, 2011) and of feminist theorists (including Ahmed & Stacey, 2001; Butler, 1993; Gallop, 1988; Grosz, 1994) have argued for the central fact of bodily awareness amid the undoubted power and complexity of language-based experience. Bodily awareness cannot be simply equated with core consciousness, but it is its foundation, and there is abundant evidence (e.g., Gallagher, 2005) that it remains central to our sense of self. It is undoubtedly difficult to quieten, let alone silence, the hubbub of higher-order consciousness, but it seems clear that we can recapture significant and extended glimpses of primary consciousness through a variety of meditational practices, and through a whole range of intense sensorimotor experiences of which music is one—most obviously in what Judith Becker (2004) has called “deep listening.” We may invariably resort to language when trying to communicate those experiences to others, and even in ramifying the understanding of those experiences for ourselves, but they remain direct experiences that we can also encounter outside language. So while recognizing the constant interplay between primary and higher-order consciousness, and the crucial role that this perpetual dialogue plays in all our lives, I am going to set aside direct discussion of higher-order consciousness for the remainder of this article.

A striking feature of Max’s account of his listening discussed above is the way that it engages both with the sounds themselves, and with what they specify. The psychologist James Gibson, whose work is a seminal influence on the ecological perspective presented here and elsewhere (Clarke, 2005; Dibben, 2001; Windsor, 2004; Windsor & de Bézenac, 2012), wrote little or nothing about music, but he made some important remarks about looking at pictures that are relevant here. His remarks relate to what he called the “duality” of picture perception, but which might be generalized further to a notion of the “multiplicity” of perception:

A picture … is always a treated surface, and it is always seen in the context of other nonpictorial surfaces. Along with the invariants for the depicted layout of surfaces, there are invariants for the surface as such. It is a plaster wall, or a sheet of canvas, a panel, a screen, or a piece of paper. The glass, texture, edges, or frame of the picture surface are given in the array, and they are perceived. The information displayed is dual. The picture is always both a scene and a surface, and the scene is paradoxically behind the surface. This duality of the information is the reason the observer is never quite sure how to answer the question, “What do you see?” (Gibson, 1979, p. 281)

In a similar manner, consider the recording of Schubert’s song “An die Musik” made by Elena Gerhardt, accompanied by Arthur Nikisch, in 1911. ⁶ Recorded before the era of electrical microphones, and transferred from a wax master on to a 78 rpm shellac disc, the sound that a listener hears prominently features the hissy and crackly sounds of the record surface itself, and the spectral/timbral limitations of the recording technology of that era. In contemporary culture, that sound has become powerfully identifiable as “the sound of the past” (in very much the same way that black and white, or sepia-tinted photographs have become “the look of the past”) because of the increasing availability of historical recordings through re-releases, and the use of old recordings in sampling (see Clarke, 2007). Asked “What do you hear?” a listener—depending on expertise, interests, and perspective—might legitimately answer “the past,” “a 78 rpm recording,” “‘An die Musik’ by Schubert,” or “Arthur Nikisch and Elena Gerhardt.” Rich sources of perceptual information (as pictures and recordings are) afford multiple and diverse perceptual experiences, which raises the question of how perceivers find sense among these possibilities—how it is that we experience our own (musical) consciousness as possessing any semblance of stability and connectedness. ⁷

Multiplicity, multiple drafts and musical consciousness

With so many different events, objects, qualities, and attributes specified by music, what ends up in consciousness? How does a perceiver focus upon and keep track of anything in this potential maelstrom of different and simultaneous possibilities? This question for music is simply a specific version of the same much more general question for consciousness as a whole: given the continuous multiplicity of human experience, why and how do some things get into consciousness while some do not? This is a profound and fundamental question, about which there has been a great deal of writing and speculation both within psychology, where it has often been framed as the problem of selective attention (for a review, see Driver, 2001)—but the philosopher Daniel Dennett has offered a rather appealing perspective on it that has a particular affinity or resonance with the circumstances of music. What Dennett suggests is that there is no single stream of consciousness, and no central “place” in the mind where consciousness takes place, or appears—but rather a continuous multiplicity of available streams or threads, constantly rising and falling in their intensity, activity and interest-value. He proposes a model in which perceptual and cognitive activity proceeds in constant and fluctuating parallelism, with different streams of this parallel processing reaching consciousness at different times. Consciousness is not some singular and unified phenomenon, but is constantly in flux, subject both to the perceptual attractors of the external and internal or bodily environment, and also to the roving probe that is the subject’s own intentionality. What occupies consciousness at any time is simply what has risen—or perhaps been called—to the surface of this experiential tangle, in what Dennett calls a “multiple drafts” model:

There is no single, definitive “stream of consciousness,” because there is no central Headquarters … where “it all comes together”… Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try … to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of “narrative” play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. (Dennett, 1991, p. 253)

What is striking is how similar this is to the many-stranded and polyphonic character—both literally and more metaphorically—of many musical cultures. And in a paper published in the same year as Dennett’s book on consciousness, Ray Jackendoff (1991) proposed the outlines of a parallel processing model of continuous “on-line” music perception and musical affect that is very similar in its general principles to Dennett’s multiple drafts model.

Let me summarize what I have proposed so far: (i) Primary musical consciousness is bound up with the non-verbal core of musical listening (and playing); is closely identified with the perceptual present (or working memory) and the dynamics of continuous musical listening; and brings together sounds, events, their embodied hedonic value, and the distinction between self and non-self. (ii) From an ecological perspective, the principal concern in engaging with the world—real and virtual, musical as well as “everyday”—is to perceive “what’s going on and what to do about it.” (iii) One way to understand our capacity to deal with the teeming multiplicity of “things that are going on” is in terms of a multiple drafts approach, in which now this, now that or another, thread or stream rises, or is called, to the surface of current consciousness.

This “polyphonic” image of musical consciousness (cf. Gritten, 2011) now brings me back to the relationship between consciousness and subjectivity, and the loss and discovery of self, with which this paper started. By “subjectivity” I mean that first-person experience of ourselves, which we construe as being both intensely personal—and at the same time a general attribute of what it is to be human. The definitions of the terms self, consciousness, and subjectivity are significantly overlapping, and vary according the particular intellectual traditions (philosophical, psychological, sociological) in which they are used, but it is a common assumption (whether justified or not) that behind or beyond the specific manifestations of a person’s appearance, behaviors and beliefs there is a domain of “subjectivity” or sometimes more specifically “human subjectivity” that constitutes a more constant, broadly first-person perspective. Within some approaches this use of the term implies a rather broad and philosophically abstract category—the category of human subjectivity that applies (by implication) to all human beings anywhere and at any time; and within others, and particularly under the influence of social constructionist (e.g., Berger & Luckman 1966) or performative theories (e.g., Butler 1990), it has been asserted that there is an indefinite number of specific, contingent, and situated human subjectivities (note the plural). While the terms “self” and “identity” have been more commonly associated with sociological and social psychological writing, and “consciousness” with philosophy and neuroscience, “subjectivity” has appeared more prominently in philosophical and musicological discussions with an emphasis on the ways in which subjectivity is culturally and historically constituted.

There have been few empirical investigations of the idea that music can express, engage, or construct human subjectivity, but a paper concerned with musical meaning by Roger Watt and Roisin Ash (1998) is one such attempt. Watt and Ash asked 180 listeners to rate a number of pieces of music on various standard bipolar scales covering a range of different attributes—the idea being to determine whether some kinds of adjective scales seemed more reasonable as descriptors of music than others. The participants, who had varying amounts and types of previous listening experience and musical training, were asked to rate four extracts of instrumental music each lasting a minute or two, on a number of adjective scales. The music consisted of two extracts from Wagner’s Siegfried, an extract from Stockhausen’s Kontakte, and an extract of (unspecified) medieval dance music, and participants were asked to rate each extract of music using 14 bipolar adjectival contrasts. These were: male–female, good–evil, young–old, sad–joyful, angry–pleased, gentle–violent, stable–unstable, leaden–weightless, bright–dull, prickly–smooth, sweet–sour, narrow–wide, dry–moist, and day–night. Watt and Ash identified this collection as containing adjective pairs describing people traits (relatively stable and long-lasting attributes of people, such as male–female or good–evil); adjective pairs describing people states (relatively quickly changing attributes of people’s states of mind and body, such as sad–joyful or angry–pleased); adjective pairs that describe physical states, (such as leaden–weightless); and finally adjective pairs that the authors describe as being rarely applied to people (such as day–night or dry–moist). ⁸ The same participants also rated four examples of what the authors describe as “wholesome foodstuffs” as a comparison to the music-rating task.

The aim of the study was to determine whether the participants used these adjective pairs in systematic and stable, as opposed to random or idiosyncratic, ways; whether they did so in different ways for music and for foodstuffs; and in particular whether there were any differences in the ways that different kinds of adjective pairs were used. The results showed that these participants responded in significantly non-random and consistent ways for both music and the foodstuffs; that their responses were significantly more stable and consistent for music than for foodstuffs overall; and that the most stable and consistent responses—and those that were most significantly more stable and consistent for music as opposed to foodstuffs—were for those adjective pairs that described person-like characteristics (traits or states). In a subsequent part of the study, Watt and Ash found that this pattern of more stable person-like adjectives held true across a much wider range of instrumental music, ranging from mediaeval, renaissance, and baroque classical music to contemporary classical and pop music.

As Watt and Ash argue in the paper, these results suggest a simple but powerful conclusion: it is widely acknowledged and empirically demonstrable that music has a powerful effect on people, and the other significant class of “objects” that has a similarly powerful impact on us is the class of other people. The hypothesis that follows is that “there is some direct relation between the psychological reaction to music and the reaction to a person” (Watt & Ash, 1998, p. 49), and that there is a strong inclination for listeners to hear music as if it were mimicking or representing the actions of a person (see also Cochrane, 2011). The attribution of these person-like characteristics is “made to the music, not to the composer or the performer. Loosely speaking, music creates a virtual person” (Watt & Ash, 1998, p. 49)—‘virtual’ in the sense that this is not a person who is or was ever actually present. As far as musical meaning is concerned—which was the explicit focus of Watt and Ash’s investigation—this suggests that music is primarily concerned with what they describe as “disclosure meaning”—a revealing of something about a (virtual) person’s state of body and/or mind.

While there has been little attempt to follow this up empirically, the idea that music has attributes either of an idealized person, or of an idealized collection or community of people is one that appears in a wide variety of writing on music. One of many musicologists to do so, Lawrence Kramer (e.g., 2001, 2003) has written extensively about music as the image of a kind of imagined subjectivity—not associated specifically with the composer, performers, or anyone else explicitly and literally engaged with the making of the music, nor simply as the mirror of a listener’s own subjectivity, but in a more abstracted and generic manner. Likewise, the philosopher and violinist Naomi Cumming, in a paper that focuses on the violin introduction to the aria “Erbarme Dich” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, writes of how the listener does not just find her or his own subjectivity passively reflected back, but reconfigured:

The pathos of Bach’s introduction, and its elevated style, are quite unmistakable, and recognition promotes empathy. Once involved with the unfolding of the phrase’s subjectivity, the listener does not, however, find a simple reflection of his or her own expectancies. The music forms the listener’s experience, and in its unique negotiation of the tension between striving and grief, it creates a knowledge of something that has been formerly unknown, something that asks to be integrated in the mind of the hearer. (Cumming, 1997, p. 17)

And in a still more explicitly psychological manner, Tia DeNora (2000, 2003, 2013) has written of the ways in which music acts as a medium that can allow a listener to structure and organize their identity—in long-term ways, and as a way of managing their immediate emotional states and sense of identity. Writing of one of her informants, ‘Lucy’, DeNora points out how she uses music as a medium in which she can draw a connection between the musical material, her own identity, and a kind of social ideal. As Lucy herself expresses it, she “finds herself,” the “me in life” within musical materials, in a manner that allows her to reflect on who she is and how she would like to be—a process that DeNora points out is not just private and individual:

Viewed from the perspective of how music is used to regulate and constitute the self, the[se] “solitary and individualistic” practices … may be re-viewed as part of a fundamentally social process of self-structuration, the constitution and maintenance of self. In this sense then, the ostensibly private sphere of music use is part and parcel of the cultural constitution of subjectivity, part of how individuals are involved in constituting themselves as social agents. (DeNora, 2000: 47–48)

Conclusions

Having moved in philosophical and sociological directions, I will conclude by considering some of the psychological and neuroscientific implications—or components—of what I have been proposing. A central question that is raised by Watt and Ash’s proposal that music “creates a virtual person” is how, and why, it is that we hear musical sounds as having person-like attributes. One broad approach to this question has been based on music’s embodied character—music’s origins in the body and its capacity to engage the body—and there are now a significant number of individuals and research groups tackling different aspects of this question. ⁹ There are many ways to conceptualize music’s embodied character, from the semiotics of the body and metaphor theory, to ecological and sensorimotor contingency theories. But an approach that has attracted a considerable amount of attention in this millennium has been the interest in mirror neuron systems. In the 20 years or more since mirror neurons were first discovered or proposed, some dramatic claims have been made for what might be explained by this system (e.g., Ramachandran 2000), and there have been significant debates about the evolutionarily adapted or associatively acquired nature of the system (for a review, see Heyes, 2010). Leaving aside some of the more exaggerated claims, mirror systems do offer one component of a compelling explanation for how it is that music can engage listeners in such powerfully corporeal experiences. A number of perception-action correspondence systems—among them the mirror system—provide the basis for human beings to understand one another’s actions “from the inside,” as it were. And a consequence of this empathetic sensitivity is that the products of human action—particularly those that vividly bear the traces of that action, as music does—can give rise to a strong sense of abstracted or implicit human agency. It is this embodiment of human agency and presence that then leads to an involvement with a virtual subjectivity that inheres in the music itself.

The listening/acting body, in other words, is the primary channel for the empathy that engages our subjective engagement, or identification, with music. We are “lost” in music in the sense of inhabiting it, and finding ourselves at one with it, and we are “found” in music in the sense of recognizing ourselves—or something like ourselves, perhaps a distortion, idealization or some other transformation of ourselves—in music. As Andy McGuiness and Katie Overy (2011, p. 246) put it: “motor responses to gesture contribute to an emotional response to music and depend on subpersonal processes (not available to consciousness) that provide affective outputs to consciousness at the bodily, pre-reflective level. Motor resonance to musical gestures experienced by the listener thus contributes to a highly developed, but still pre-reflective, form of empathy or co-subjectivity.”

If this embodied empathy provides a possible explanatory mechanism for the capacity of music to engage, construct, reflect and shape human subjectivity, what are the advantages of this perspective, and how does it relate to the more familiar territory of music and emotion? First, a perspective based in musical consciousness and subjectivity helps to avoid a too narrow focus on the unhelpful binary divide between emotion and cognition, though emotion is of course an important component of this larger entanglement. Second, the perspective provides a way to acknowledge and incorporate the close reciprocity between perception and action, and more generally the animated and embodied character of musical experience, drawing on a range of perception/action or sensorimotor structures and processes that may lie behind the empathetic, co-subjective and inter-subjective relationships that music affords. Third, the perspective I have presented here provides a way to engage with phenomenological accounts of musical experience, in support of Alf Gabrielsson’s (2010, p. 571) call for “continued research on strong experiences [to] apply a flexible interplay between naturalistic and experimental approaches” in which “free phenomenological report is an indispensable component.” And finally, the approach also provides a way to place the psychology of music within a wider cultural and historical context. Musicological accounts of musical subjectivity have argued for the importance of recognizing the historicity of subjectivity, as the following two passages illustrate. The first, from Susan McClary’s Modal Subjectivities (2004), reflects on changing experiences of subjectivity in the 16th-century madrigal:

This shift in the madrigal had profound effects on the conceptions of subjectivity. If Willaert immersed his performer/auditors in the structuring of interiority from the inside—actually making each singer experience the conflicts between his/her line and those that battled for supremacy around it—Wert positions his listeners as spectators who watch the process unfold in pyrotechnics from the outside. Participation gives way to the gaze, dense interaction to awe-inspiring surface. (McClary, 2004, p. 134)

And the second, from a paper by John Butt (Butt, 2010a; and see also 2010b) on emotion and subjective time consciousness in music by Heinrich Schütz and J. S. Bach, points to similar issues of changing subjectivity and the emergence of a “modern” subjectivity in the experience of music:

With Bach’s cyclic but often unpredictable structures, music seems to have taken over something of the atmosphere of religious ritual, but coupled with the immediacy and emotional intensity of personal experience. … [I]t is clear that the music both evokes and tracks a sort of subjectivity which is close to what we might call “modern”—a kind sustained by the consciousness of oneself enduring over longer stretches of time … (Butt, 2010a, p. 31)

Emotions, then, are a component of that rich and dynamic tangle of subjective, co-subjective and inter-subjective states that together allow us to be lost and found in music—along with the palpably perceptual and animatedly bodily qualities of what it is like to be engaged with music, and with others in music. Following a phase in music psychology research in which emotions were considered too subjective, too intangible, and too contextual and multidimensional to be tackled in any convincing or rigorous fashion, there have now been more than two decades in which research into music and emotion has been pursued with great vigor and energy. There is no doubt that this has been a very positive and productive development, but there is also the danger of a certain flatness and one dimensionality in that now rather too well-worn claim that “the reason why people get involved with music is because of the powerful emotions that music stimulates.” The statement claims both too much, and too little: too much in that there are plenty of very engaging experiences with music that do not obviously or significantly involve emotions as their most important characteristic; and too little if we restrict ourselves to those categories and dimensions that have come to dominate emotion research. Having shown that systematic and rigorous emotion research in music is perfectly possible, perhaps it is time to re-embed emotions in the broader ecological context of human consciousness and subjectivity that I have attempted to outline here.

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