Understanding our experience of music: What kind of psychology do we need?

Abstract

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 representations of music in the sense that a particular "style of aesthetic experience" typifies a historical period. Although this is a genuine psychological question, it cannot be answered by a psychology which is restricted to "ahistorical" explanations of information processing. Thus from a cultural anthropological perspective there is strong interest in any kind of "cultural psychology" which is able to conceptualise the dynamic interactions between culturally determined "social representations" of music and the individual mind. Goals. We argue for a "cultural turn" in the psychology of music. Following developments within psychology, research over recent decades in the psychology of music has concentrated on neuro-cognition while cultural aspects have been underestimated -as they continue to be in psychology in general. Conclusions. An important task for an interdisciplinary framework that wishes to include the cultural sciences and psychology should be to review recent cultural psychological theories to assess their implications for a psychological theory of music. As examples we use Ernst E. Boesch's Symbolic Action Theory which explicitly refers to the role of aesthetic experience in cultural contexts and Alfred Lang's "semiotic ecology" which provides an appropriate model for conceptualising the complex relations between the development of cultural patterns and the development of related individual representations.

The performer’s experience: A case for using qualitative (phenomenological) methodologies in music performance research

“…We do not necessarily advocate a move away from more traditional, behaviour-based research methods, or indeed, other quantitative and qualitative techniques (cf. Allesch & Krakauer, 2006), but rather, we suggest that phenomenological analysis and interpretation can reveal an idiographic relationship between the subjective conscious awareness and the cognitive landscape of the individual. If this approach can provide a basis for both psychological and related neuroscientific experiment (cf.…”

“…Research in music performance has been conducted within a range of disciplines, but often employing predominantly quantitative methodologies. Qualitative methods, although shown to be significantly revealing in the investigation of individual performer experience (e.g., Chaffin & Imreh, 2001; Holmes, 2012) are still under-represented in the literature (Allesch & Krakauer, 2006; Randles, 2012) which may be due in some measure to the long held view that such methods were regarded as less reliable indicators in terms of measuring properties of performance (Ashworth, 2009[2008]). The increasing numbers of studies that have undertaken qualitative research among performers are generally directed towards performers’ reflections on the processes, objectives and effects in performance (e.g., Clark, Williamon, & Lisboa, 2007), as distinct from the ‘richness of thought and purpose’ (Jorgensen, 2009, p. 70) that characterises the subjective experience, namely music as it is constituted in the mind and body of the performer (cf.…”

“…Qualitative studies that do concentrate on the performer’s experience illuminate aspects of performance and address questions that would be poorly served by a quantitative approach. If the emphasis is on function rather than meaning (Cross, 2008), there is a concentration on the performance itself (whether relating to listener perception and affect, or performer reflection), rather than the cognitive and emotional world of the performer – an inside/outside dichotomy that has long been held to be counterproductive to real understanding and appreciation of artistic endeavour (Allesch & Krakauer, 2006; Dewey, 1934; cf. Bresler, 2006a).…”

Dynamic music and immersion in the action-adventure an empirical investigation

“…Thus, the accompanying stimuli must be reviewed according to their shaping by the players' individual manifestations of meaning. Arguing for a cultural turn in music psychology, Allesch and Krakauer [1] put forward a desideratum of refocusing the contextual implications of aesthetic experience in what Bruner describes as "the nature and cultural shaping of meaning-making, and the central place it plays in human action" [7]. Besides an understanding of meaning-making processes, more specific questions concerning the psychological effects of dynamic music will have to be addressed in the future.…”

Chuckrow’s theory of the prenatal origin of music

“…Instead, psychology became more empirical, quantitative and materialist, reacting against earlier speculative, qualitative and phenomenological traditions. The 1970s “cultural turn” in the humanities inspired the new musicology of the 1980s (Fulcher, 2011), which in turn led to a cultural turn in music psychology in the 1990s (Allesch & Krakauer, 2006), expanding the range of methodological and epistemological approaches. In this context, two empirically, less tangible topics were revived, namely, musical emotion and musical origins.…”