Are Spiritual Experiences through Music Seen as Intrinsic or Extrinsic?

Abstract

Music has a great capacity to afford spiritual experiences, but are those experiences intrinsic or extrinsic to the music? This paper reports the results of research aimed at answering that research question. One hundred and seventeen self-reported Christian religious people completed a survey, answering eight rating-item questions about strong musical experiences, both in a religious and a non-religious context. Factor analysis revealed that ratings related to spirituality grouped together, but were separate from intrinsic and extrinsic semantic groupings, suggesting that there is something special about the phenomenon of spiritual experiences with music that is beyond a simple identifiable source. We concluded that spirituality, therefore, appears to be something profound and transcendent that comes to life with the musical forms, rather than being perceived as either explicitly intrinsic or extrinsic to the music. In the religious context, experiences were stronger, more spiritual, and more emotional, but in the non-religious context experiences elicited similar features, just to a lesser degree. This suggests the phenomenon is not merely a product of religion. This research, although limited due to its quantitative nature, demonstrated an important place for spirituality within the experience of music, and therefore places a call on the research community to invest more in understanding this phenomenon.

“He Who Sings, Prays Twice”? Singing in Roman Catholic Mass Leads to Spiritual and Social Experiences That Are Predicted by Religious and Musical Attitudes

“…Although there exists very little quantitative research on the spiritual effects of music and (group) singing, the findings so far point in the same direction as ours and show that people do have spiritual experiences in conjunction with music ( Hills and Argyle, 1998 ; Clift and Hancox, 2001 ; Atkins and Schubert, 2014 ; Demmrich, 2018 ). Specifically, the studies by Hills and Argyle (1998) and Clift and Hancox (2001) have shown that group singing is associated with several experienced effects or benefits simultaneously, including social and spiritual ones.…”

“…Quantitative studies or experiments, however, have only started to emerge. While some of these studies examine the context of listening to religious music (Lowis and Hughes, 1997;Atkins and Schubert, 2014), a few others address religious experiences in the context of singing (Hills and Argyle, 1998;Clift and Hancox, 2001;Miller and Strongman, 2002). In these studies, questionnaires were used to ask members of churches and/or choirs about their singing experiences.…”

Integration of Spirituality, Music and Emotions in Health Care

“…Research underlines the effectiveness of music in anxiety, pain, depression and emotional coping [136,137]. Music has the capacity to create positive emotions and spiritual well-being and patients confirm this experience [14,87,117,138,139].…”

“…Literature provides strong evidence that emotional and spiritual needs affect one other, and have impact on the health and financial outcomes of hospitals [12,13]. Music is capable of affecting and eliciting spiritual experiences in health care and at the same time can enhance mood which can contribute to the wholeness of a person [14][15][16][17][18].…”

Music’s Role in Facilitating the Process of Healing—A Thematic Analysis

“…They believed that their involvement with the youth group provided them with "guidance and growth," and Praise and Worship supported them when they needed to "cope with difficulties." A survey study conducted by Atkins and Schubert (2014) investigated whether the spiritual experience through music is intrinsic: whether it was evoked from music itself or extrinsically evoked by the memories or emotions associated with music. One hundred and seventeen people who attend various types of Christian churches such as Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Uniting Church members participated in the study, and the results indicated that spiritual experience, which is profound and transcendent, "comes to life" (p. 76), with musical forms.…”