Abstract
It is hard to overstate the intimacy of the relationship between music and consciousness. Without consciousness, music would be nothing but silent sound waves. And without music, consciousness would arguably remain a wasted potential. The domain of musical experience, covering music listening as well as music performance, across a wide diversity of contexts, thus appears as a natural field of investigation for consciousness studies. Conversely, focussing one’s attention on the peculiarities of conscious musical experience offers significant opportunities for music and sound studies, enabling its practitioners to explore dimensions of musical experience left unaddressed by the examination of scores, recordings, texts, or fMRI brain scans alone.
It is in this spirit that David Clarke and Eric Clarke initiated, in 2006, a series of international conferences on Music and Consciousness. The first installment gave rise to the edited volume Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives (Clarke and Clarke, 2011). The volume under consideration here, Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities, edited by the same team augmented by Ruth Herbert, stems in turn from the second installment of the conference series, held in Oxford in 2015. It contains 17 essays distributed into three parts: “Music, consciousness and the four Es,” “Consciousness in musical practice,” and “Kinds of musical consciousness.”
There is a clear continuity between the motivation and main argument of Music and Consciousness 2 and those of the original Music and Consciousness volume. One strong element of continuity is the inclusiveness of the project. From a methodological point of view, the collection showcases a wide variety of approaches, denying any neuroscientific, or even cognitive-scientific, monopoly on the study of musical consciousness. As a result, the book is essentially a multidisciplinary effort, involving contributors with backgrounds both in science (cognitive science, neurology, cognitive psychology, computer science) and in the humanities (musicology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, psychoanalysis). The volume is also inclusive in the sense of investigating the character of musical experience in a large array of musical cultures, including electronic trance music, free improvised music, chamber and symphonic music in the Western tradition, and North Indian classical music (to give but a few representative examples). In addition to this geocultural diversity, the book devotes significant attention to both high art and everyday experiences of music. Finally, the book deftly balances the study of the conscious aspect of music reception with the investigation of the conscious dimension of music making.
This multifaceted diversity, however, does not prevent the emergence of common themes that run throughout the book. The temporal aspects of musical experience, for example, show up in various guises. Mark Doddman’s chapter distinguishes different modalities in which time enters the intentionality of consciousness in musical performance, as directed towards timekeeping versus timeliness, while Freya Bailes studies the times in the day at which earworms enter our consciousness and proposes a cyclical model of musical imagery that connects biological rhythms with features of attention and mental activity, and thus explains the observed decoupling between the vividness and the frequency of earworms. The phenomenology of absorption is another topic on which multiple contributions offer contrasting and complementary approaches. Simon Høffding proposes a detailed analysis of the phenomenology of passivity, drawing on phenomenological interviews with the Danish String Quartet and on insights from Husserl’s classical philosophical analyses of passivity. Ruth Herbert problematizes the ways in which the notion of absorption is sometimes conceptualized as a trait or as a state and proposes a view of absorption as an “attentional given,” that is, a way of managing attention that is effortlessly present in children but that may later be concealed or lessened in adult life. The chapter by Kat Agres, Louis Bigo, and Dorien Herremens identifies positive effects of structural repetition and chord diversity on the enjoyment of electronic trance music, finding that the more a piece is prone to trigger states of absorption, the more it tends to be enjoyed by listeners.
This second volume also brings new voices into the mix. First, it draws greater attention to the theoretical foundations of the study of consciousness, in particular by dedicating the first part of the volume to the “four Es” approach to cognition and consciousness. Since 2006 the field of consciousness studies has considerably grown and solidified. The familiar complaints against the “consciousness inessentialism” (Flanagan, 1992) of traditional cognitive science have been complemented by a family of positive proposals, commonly referred to individually as Embodied, Extended, Embedded, and Enacted, and collectively as the “four Es,” that allow for new approaches to consciousness. It is no surprise that researchers concerned with musical experience find much to use in such a tool kit, but after the enthusiasm that such approaches legitimately spurred when they first appeared, it is fair to say that we have reached a point where we need to pause and evaluate the benefits of these strands, both individually and collectively. This is in particular the case when one shifts the focus from cognition (the domain in which the four Es were initially developed) to consciousness, since it is not prima facie clear whether the move from an “E-cognition” to an “E-consciousness” is always attractive, for some Es at least. Many proponents of the Extended Cognition Thesis, for example, remain sceptical regarding the corresponding Extended Consciousness Thesis (see, for example, Chalmers, 2019).
Christoph Seibert’s chapter “Situated approaches to musical experience” thus provides a timely attempt to draw a precise map of this new territory, making careful distinctions between the various ways in which each of the Es above can be projected from the domain of musical cognition to the domain of musical experience. His concluding suggestion that “various aspects of consciousness can be addressed by scrutinizing the different ways that we engage with music” (p. 27) is to a certain extent confirmed by all the papers of the first part of the volume. Lawrence Zbikowski provides a nuanced view of the relation between cognitive extension in music and musical experience, which, in agreement with Chalmers (2019), he takes not to be similarly extended, but rather to be embedded in the complex of external entities into which music cognition extends. By means of two intriguing examples, namely worship and torture, Joel Krueger convincingly shows how “self-regulative processes responsible for generating and maintaining emotional consciousness can be offloaded onto the musical worlds we inhabit,” adding a fifth E of “Emotion” to the family. Eric Clarke adds two more Es of “Empathy” and “Ecology,” arguing that the human voice is a central channel for empathic communication. Maria A. G. Witek proposes an original view of the “vibe” that one may experience at a rave or in an electronic music dance club as a “cognitively, socially, affectively, bodily and environmentally distributed phenomenon,” while David Borgo trades Es for As as he links Douglas Hoftstadter notion of “strange loops” (Hofstadter, 2007) to the interplay of attention, awareness, and action in musical improvisation.
Research within this “four Es” paradigm is sometimes criticized for it lack of argumentative rigor (see, for example, Carney, 2020), and this kind of criticism could also be leveled against some quick and questionable argumentative moves found in the present volume, such as the leap from empathetic communication to “extended consciousness” found in Eric Clarke’s chapter (p. 87), or from the tight coupling between dancers and the music to a “dissolution of the boundaries between our minds, our bodies, and the music” found in Maria Wittek’s chapter (p. 100). There might be a point to make in favor of a “permissive” use of the key theoretical constructs of that paradigm (Sarrinen, 2020), insofar as it enables stimulating and thought-provoking analyses such as the ones found in the book. A virtue of Seibert’s chapter in particular, however, is to show how conceptual clarity and rigor are also an important source of insight and progress.
Another prominent trend in this second volume is the contrast and interplay between conscious and non-conscious aspects of musical experience. Based on qualitative interviews of jazz musicians and a review of the experimental and neuroscientific research on improvisation, Martin Norgaard proposes a dual-process theory of improvisation, in which automatic and subconscious processes play a critical role. Robert Harris and Bauke M. de Jong investigate by means of cognitive-neuroscientific methods the connection between audition and action. Operating from the standpoint of the dual-stream model of perception and action, they interpret the differences in the patterns of brain activations among expert improvisers and expert score-dependent musicians as evidence that the former have an enhanced audition for action in virtue of ideomotor learning strategies, while the latter rely mostly on sensorimotor mapping. The main lesson of this for the study of musical consciousness is that a lot of it depends in fact on non-conscious processes. From a different angle, Vivek Virani explores various senses in which the sophisticated mūrchana racanā (literally “unconsciousness compositions”) of Hindustani tabla master Suresh Talwalkar involve a “musical unconscious.” Drawing on concepts from Hindustani rhythmic theory and spiritual practice, he contrasts the “musical unconsciousness” stemming from the sheer inability to keep track of polymetric rhythmical structures, with the “dissociative unconsciousness” experienced by the performers when actively attempting to cognize simultaneously two disparate meters. Shierry Weber Nicholsen builds an analogy between Freud’s views on psychoanalytical listening and Adorno’s theory of music listening, using insights of the former to illuminate the thought of the latter. In both cases, listening is cast as a process by which, in Nicholsen’s words, “an unconscious state emerges into consciousness—against resistance and through the work of alert receptive attention—while at the same time transforming the consciousness involved” (p. 229). By drawing attention to such entanglements between consciousness, unconsciousness, and everything that occurs in the grey areas at the border between the two, this set of studies adds a significant dimension to the study of musical experience.
If the overarching argument of the book is that musical experience has something significant to teach about consciousness—something that is easily, and too often, neglected by both mainstream consciousness and music studies—then it is largely successful. While the wide variety of backgrounds of contributors and methodologies make it unlikely that any one reader will be equally sensitive to the potential import of all the contributions, the richness and variety of the phenomena discussed page after page clearly suffice to make the point. It is then perhaps more relevant to ask what is specifically taught by music about consciousness—that is, what is taught by music about consciousness that could not have been taught by other means?
In their introductory essay, the editors seem tempted by the view that music does afford a privileged insight into consciousness itself. While there is no doubt that musicking provides an extremely rich and diverse set of conscious experiences, it is not always clear what new general insights such musical experience brings to the fore. Many contributions do succeed at showing how musical cases exemplify important general claims about cognition and consciousness (the four Es, dual process theories, dual-stream model of perception and action, and so on), but in such cases, music appears to be less of a pioneer than a co-worker. Pointing this out is not to diminish the importance of the role of music in the investigation of consciousness, but rather to prompt a reflection on the precise nature of this role. If any of the views starting with an E are correct, then it is undoubtedly important to have arguments from music to illustrate and defend this. But it is unclear why music would need to have a privileged relationship to consciousness for this to be the case.
Besides very general arguments taken from the views of romantic and idealist philosophers, the editors bring an important consideration to the discussion in their suggestion that what makes music especially relevant to the study of consciousness is less its specific essence than the “sheer range of its affordances across its prolific cultural formations” (p. 7)—something that is nicely established by the volume as a whole. From there, one might conclude, as the editors do, that we need a construction of music “in the singular,” as a global phenomenon, in order to account for its special relevance to consciousness, also understood in the singular. An alternative conclusion from the same premise, however, could be that we might gain even more insights from the integration of a larger number of cultural practices, including visual arts, dance, meditation, and sports (none of which are completely alien to music).
The set of contributions collected in this volume will provide a wealth of insights and thought-provoking ideas to anyone interested in music, consciousness, or both. It will also provide an excellent overview of the current state of the now established field of “music and consciousness.” This will be the case at least until the next edition of the conference, hopefully to be followed by another companion volume, discloses yet another set of creative new developments.
