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Enacting musical emotions. sense-making, dynamic systems, and the embodied mind

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Abstract

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind.

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Notes

  1. This idea underlies for example Juslin’s Expanded Lens Model (2005). According to this model an emotional message is encoded by the composer; performers manipulate different musical parameters so that their combination increases the probability that the listener will identify the ‘right’ emotion intended by them.

  2. Huron (2001) has considered the evolutionary status of music from both adaptationist and non-adaptationist perspectives; he adopts a highly informed but relatively open position on the subject. Nevertheless, he appears to remain committed to explaining musical emotions largely in terms of evolved appraisal mechanisms, which permit statistical forms of learning that allow the cognizer to form representations that correspond with the features of the ‘external’ world (Huron 2006).

  3. We acknowledge that the notion of appraisal as quick, primitive and automatic may appear controversial. However, we endorse here a rather ‘broad’ definition of appraisal, as proposed by a number of contemporary emotion theories: “appraisal is a process that takes a stimulus as its input and produces values for one or more appraisal variables as its output” (Moors 2013, p. 133). This means that appraisals are processes by which a stimulus is evaluated and values are produced (i.e. how good/bad, safe/threatening, expected/unexpected, beautiful/ugly, good for my goals/bad for my goals, a stimulus is). Thus, evaluation is performed both by basic and quick mechanisms - such as the novelty check, that is produced in less than 500 ms by primitive mechanisms, including the amygdala - and by slow mechanisms - like the aesthetic evaluation of a piece of music’s beauty, which depends on slow, propositional, cortical processing (for more details on this inclusive definition of cognitive appraisals see Clore and Ortony 2000, and Sander et al. 2005).

  4. However, as we will see, the stages of engagement with music should not be understood as discreet, but rather as integrated and relational.

  5. The concept of music user is to be considered as a generic term that encompasses all agents that deal with music in some way or another (listeners, composers, learners, performers, and so forth) (see Laske 1977; Reybrouck 2005).

  6. We should here distinguish between cases in which the body displays active, motivated behavior - for example when playing a musical instrument - and cases in which its participation is merely passive - for example when the movements employed do not exhibit clear goal-directedness. This latter kind of movements, such as intransitive limb gestures for example, has been shown to be less effective in action understanding (e.g. Iacoboni 2008; Rizzolatti et al. 2001) and its role in musical sense-making is still an object of controversy (See Leman and Maes 2015, and commentaries). In this sense, we think the role of rhythmic entrainment for embodied and enactive music cognition remains unclear.

  7. The idea that emotion should involve a set of discrete universally recognised response categories imposed by natural selection.

  8. Juslin (2013b) argues for the adoption of Basic Emotion Theory (BET) proper in music emotion studies - i.e. that we should build our theories of complex emotions around the ‘core layer’ of ‘iconically coded basic emotions’. Indeed, BET resonates with Juslin’s findings in many interesting ways; his approach is compelling and continues to offer important new insights. However, many researchers in affective science (see Colombetti 2014; Barrett 2006) have begun to offer alternative perspectives that are critical of BET while nevertheless attempting to account for how emotions are experienced as patterned and recurrent (this includes Ekman himself who has distanced himself from BET in recent years; Ekman and Cordaro 2011).

  9. Here readers may wish to consider approaches that are neither traditionally cognitivist nor enactivist, such as predictive processing (Gentsch and Synofzik 2014; Seth and Critchley 2013).

  10. While Koelsh (e.g., 2013) often uses ‘inductive’ or ‘mechanistic’ terminology, he seems to adopt a somewhat more cautious stance towards this approach in recent years, preferring to explore how emotions are ‘evoked’ rather than ‘induced’, which leads to attachment and forms of social bonding. Likewise a range of scholars have considered the centrality of music for human evolution and well-being (Cross 1999, 2001; Patel 2008; van der Schyff 2013a).

  11. Differential equations allow the functions of dynamic a system to be mathematically expressed in relation to its derivatives (or its rates of change). In contrast to static point slope equations, for example, differential equations can thus be used to model how a system develops continuously over time. This permits researchers to map a much wider range of relationships between variables, as well as make distinctions between local and global features in ways that are not possible with linear modelling.

  12. Some readers may note similarities with constructivist approaches (Russell 2003; Barrett 2006), which argue that emotions cannot be understood in terms of discrete regions in the brain, but rather result from dynamic interactions between large-scale networks involved with domain-general processing (Barrett and Satpute 2013). However, it should be noted that such approaches tend to downplay of the role of the ‘biological’ in episodes considered properly ‘emotional’.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Fred Cummins for providing us with insights that helped greatly in the early stages of preparing this manuscript. We are also grateful to Renee Timmers, Tom Cochrane, Giovanna Colombetti, and to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Schiavio, A., van der Schyff, D., Cespedes-Guevara, J. et al. Enacting musical emotions. sense-making, dynamic systems, and the embodied mind. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 785–809 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9477-8

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