Enacting Musical Experience

Joel W.
Krueger
Enacting Musical Experience

Abstract: I argue for an enactive account of musical experience —
that is, the experience of listening ‘deeply’(i.e., sensitively and under-
standingly) to a piece of music. The guiding question is: what do we
do when we listen ‘deeply’to music? I argue that these music listening
episodes are, in fact, doings. They are instances of active perceiving,
robust sensorimotor engagements with and manipulations of sonic
structures within musical pieces. Music is thus experiential art, and in
Nietzsche’s words, ‘we listen to music with our muscles’. This paper
attempts to explicate and defend this claim. First, I discuss enactive
approaches to consciousness and cognition generally. Next, I apply
an enactive model of perceptual consciousness to the experience of
listening to music. To clarify what is at stake, I use Peter Kivy’s ‘en-
hanced formalism’ as a philosophical foil. I then look at how the ani-
mate body shapes musical experience.
Introduction
Music surrounds us. With the advent of new listening technologies
such as cassette tapes, compact disks, and now digital music players,
music has been thoroughly integrated into nearly every practice and
institution of our individual and social existence. Music is the ultimate
‘portable art’. We carry our personal soundtracks with us wherever we
go, and potentially impose them on whomever we meet. Earphones
firmly in place, we routinely construct personal sonic worlds: autono-
mous music cocoons that mark us as, at least temporarily, inaccessible
to the outside world. We can listen to music almost constantly if we
want to. Yet despite its ubiquity, music is rife with many philosophical
Correspondence:
Joel W. Krueger, Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen,
Njalsgade 140-142, 5th Floor, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark.
Email: joelk@hum.ku.dk
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, No. 2–3, 2009, pp. 98–123

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
ENACTING MUSICAL EXPERIENCE 99
puzzles. Musical experience — the experience of listening carefully

to, understanding,1 and being moved by a piece of music—houses
many of these puzzles. How do we listen to music, exactly? What is
the mode of attention through which we sensitively engage with a
piece of music? Is music listening primarily a cognitive, perceptual, or
affective process — or some combination of the three?
These are philosophically rich questions. I have no pretensions of
treating them adequately in a single outing. What follows are instead
some reflections concerned primarily with the mode of attention we
assume when we sensitively engage with a given piece of music. In
other words, I am concerned with the experiential form of our listening-
episodes. Put yet another way, the guiding question in what follows is
this: what do we do when we listen carefully to a piece of music?
Framed thusly, my basic contention is made clear: music listening epi-
sodes are instances of doings. They are instances of active perceiving,
sensorimotor engagements with and manipulations of informa-
tion-bearing structures in pieces of music. As Nietzsche puts it, ‘we
listen to music with our muscles’ (quoted in Sacks, 2007, p. xi). I will
attempt to explicate and defend this claim.
I should note that the following reflections focus on instrumental
music: ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ music, as it’s sometimes called. As the
nineteenth-century Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick notes, ‘Of
what instrumental music cannot do, it ought never to be said that
music can do it, because only instrumental music is music purely and
absolutely…’ (Hanslick, 1986, p. 15). Without endorsing the full
force of Hanslick’s claim here, it is nevertheless clear that non-musi-
cal elements (e.g., lyrics and vocals) potentially introduce novel rep-
resentational content, emotional qualities and narrative textures into
‘pure’ music, thereby bringing their own distinct philosophical puz-
zles to the table. But these particular puzzles fall outside the scope of
this paper’s concerns. For the sake of philosophical economy, then —
and in the spirit of most recent philosophical treatments of music —
I will limit my discussion to pure or instrumental music.
In section one, I briefly lay out the general contours of enactive
approaches to consciousness and cognition, paying closer attention to
the former. I examine how Alva Noë applies an enactive account of
perceptual consciousness to the experience of looking at sculptures by
the American artist Richard Serra. Noë terms these sculptures ‘experi-
ential art’. In section two, I argue that music, too, ought to be thought
[1] By ‘understanding’ in this context, I mean simply the experience of recognizing an orga-
nized pattern of sound as music (unlike, for instance, the way that my Shiba Inus experi-
ence the music coming from my stereo as meaningless sound).

100 J.W. KRUEGER
of as a rich form of experiential art. I use an enactive model of percep-

tion to analyse episodes of sensitive music listening; and to further
clarify what is at stake in the discussion, I use philosopher Peter
Kivy’s enhanced formalist view of musical experience as a foil. Sec-
tion three then discusses how the active body fits into this picture,
making sensitive music listening a robustly sensorimotor phenomenon.
1. The Enactive Mind and ‘Experiential Art’

Recently, increasingly influential approaches to consciousness and
cognition have urged that mental phenomena are in an important sense
both rooted in and shaped by the body’s sensorimotor apparatuses and
active exploration of its world. The basic thesis of enactive
approaches to cognition can be expressed in a simple slogan: body
shapes mind.2 Thought and experience are said to emerge from
embodied action: the situated subject’s temporally-extended, explor-
atory activity as it navigates and manipulates the biological and social
structures of its everyday environments. Crucially, subject and world
are conceived of as dynamically coupled and reciprocally determin-
ing; both are co-implicated in the structure of various cognitive pro-
cesses. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch coin the
term ‘enactive’ when they write:
We propose as a name the term enactive to emphasize the growing con-
viction that cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a
pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the
basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world per-
forms (Varela et al., 1991, p.9).
Defining their approach in this way, Varela et al. argue against ‘the
centrality of the notion that cognition is fundamentally representation’
(Varela et al., 1991, p. 9). They simultaneously challenge the narrow-
ness of dominant models of mind in cognitive science that they claim,
at least up to the time of their writing, had ‘virtually nothing to say
about what it means to be human in everyday, lived situations’ (Varela
et al., 1991, p. xv). The enactive approach to mind was thus devel-
oped as a corrective to this phenomenological neglect.3
[2] This is (part of) the title of a book by Shaun Gallagher (2005) who, despite the fact that he
rarely uses the term ‘enaction’, nonetheless can be rightfully tagged an enactivist.
[3] The enactive approach has its roots in the western phenomenological tradition of philoso-
phy, particularly thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, and, perhaps most importantly,
Merleau-Ponty. For more on this connection with phenomenology, see Thompson (2005).
Varela et al. (1991) also explore some interesting connections between enactivism and
Buddhist psychology.

There are at least two major varieties of enactivism: what we might

term ‘cognitive enactivism’ (e.g., Varela et al., 1991; Thompson,
2007) and ‘perceptual enactivism’ (e.g., Noë, 2004). The former is the
more comprehensive view, aspiring to provide a broad account of
mind and cognition. The latter narrows the focus of the enactivist pro-
gram to questions about perceptual consciousness and subjectivity.4
As my focus in this paper is on music perception, I will be concerned
in what follows with what I am calling ‘perceptual enactivism’.
Alva Noë (2000; 2001; 2002; 2004; 2008) is one of the most promi-
nent current advocates of perceptual enactivism. His book Action in
Perception opens with a simple statement of the enactive approach to
perception he wishes to defend. Noë writes that ‘…perceiving is a way
of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is
something we do’ (Noë, 2004, p. 1). For Noë, perceiving is ultimately
‘a kind of skillful bodily activity’ (2004, p. 2). It is not a matter of
building up inner representations of an external world but immediate,
world-directed interaction. This means that perceptual experience
implicates not only our bodies (e.g., our sensory and motor systems)
but, additionally, involves an implicit understanding we have as sub-
jects of what our bodies can do (e.g., move around, reach for things,
pick them up, crane our necks for a better view, etc.), and how these
bodily doings alter our perceptual access to the world. Noë’s percep-
tual enactivism is thus offered as a ‘theory of access’ (2008, p. 662). It
is an attempt to account for both the character (the how) and the con-
tent (the what) of our skills-based perceptual experiences of the world
and things in it.
Noë cashes out the idea this way. When I see, for instance, a red
tomato, I don’t just have a visual experience of the front surface of the
tomato facing me at that moment. I experience the whole tomato,
including the backside currently occluded by the front. The rich three-
dimensionality of objects and scenes always outstrips the perceiver-
relative profiles objects and scenes present to us, perceptually, when
we visually experience them. Qualities like size, shape, colour, loca-
tion in space, etc. are never wholly given in our visual experiences.
We can’t assume a God’s-eye view of things all at once and see the red
surface of the tomato on the front and the back simultaneously — but
[4] One of the internal debates within enactivist circles is the extent to which autopoesis
(‘self-creation’) is central to the enactivist program (Menary 2006). Noë (2004) develops
his enactive account of perception without saying anything about the notion. Thompson
(2007) nevertheless argues that autopoesis is foundational for enactivism. For a develop-
ment of autopoesis, see Maturana and Varela (1980). Since this debate is not directly rele-
vant to my concerns in this paper, I set it aside.

102 J.W. KRUEGER
these qualities, Noë insists, are nonetheless ‘amodally’ present in our

experience (2004, p. 59).5 Put yet another way, the phenomenal
givenness of an object runs ahead of how the object literally appears
to me when I (for instance) see it. Despite the fact that I can’t attend to
the back of tomato, it is nevertheless somehow there in my
experience.
Noë calls this the ‘problem of perceptual presence’ (2008, p. 661).
How can the back of a tomato be phenomenally given without being
directly perceived? The solution to this problem, according to Noë, is
to look at how experiences are necessarily mediated by ‘sensorimotor
skills’, as well as by the practical knowledge we possess about how to
exploit these sensorimotor skills in our active perceiving. Noë
summarizes:
The solution to the problem of perceptual presence consists in recogniz-
ing that for a perceiver with the requisite understanding, seeing how
things look can be an encounter with how they are. Just as holding your
hand can be a way of holding you, so seeing how the coin looks can be
the achievement of contact with the coin. In Action and Perception I
argue that we perceive objects and the environment by exploring how
things perceptually appear. Seeing, for example, is thus an activity of
learning about the world by learning how things look. But crucially, the
look of things are not mental intermediaries. Exploring how things look
is just a way of exploring how things are (Noë, 2008, p. 665).
The tomato, including its occluded backside, is thus always given as
something that can be touched, handled, and manipulated. As directly
accessible, it offers up different affordances relative to my having the
sort of body that I do. These affordances (Noë speaks of ‘sensorimotor
dependencies’ or ‘contingencies’, 2004, p. 64) determine how objects
present themselves to us in our experiences of them: richly spatial
objects presenting both (attended) profiles as well as (unattended)
features. When I spontaneously reach for a tomato, I unthinkingly cal-
ibrate my grip to grasp what it is that I experience: a genuinely three-
dimensional tomato — not a tomato that may potentially lack a back-
side — because the world is full of three-dimensional things that, as
an active and embodied perceiver, I tacitly know I can interact with
and explore further. Of course, the tomato might be a fake tomato
lacking a backside. But if this is so, I will soon learn that I have incor-
rectly calibrated my grip relative to an expectation of tomato-plus-
backside and readjust my practical understanding of how to engage
with the backside-less tomato accordingly. This readjustment will
[5] By ‘amodal’, Noë means that the occluded side of a tomato is experientially present, i.e., it
is phenomenally given in our perception of the tomato without being directly perceived.

then change how the backside-less tomato gives itself experientially.

Something like this is what Noë seems to have in mind when he writes
In general, our sense of the perceptual presence of the detailed world
does not consist in our representation of all the detail in consciousness
now. Rather, it consists in our access now to all of the detail, and to our
knowledge we have of this access. This knowledge takes the form of our
comfortable mastery of the rules of sensorimotor dependence that
mediate our relation to [the world and things in it] (Noë, 2004, p. 63).
Again, the point is simply that our bodily engagements shape the char-
acter and content of consciousness. Experience is a mode of situated,
skillful coping.6
Noë has previously applied this account of perceptual conscious-
ness to aesthetic experience. In his paper ‘Experience and Experiment
in Art’ (2000), he discusses the large-scale metal sculptures of the
American minimalist sculptor Richard Serra. Noë labels Serra’s work
‘experiential art’. He notes that the immense scale of Serra’s sculp-
tures ‘make us reflect on how we feel, perceptually, in their presence’
(2000, p. 131). Serra’s looming works beckon for an active response.
We experience them not simply by looking but by engaging: we walk
up to them, touch and handle their surfaces, and navigate amidst the
contours of their massive structure, a site-specific form designed to fit
within a particular locale (such as a St. Louis park or a New York
plaza). In this way, ‘the process of exploring the pieces is a process of
exploring the place’ according to Noë, as well as ‘a process by which
we come to understand how experience can be…a form of openness to
the world’ (2000, p. 132). Serra’s ‘experiential art’, as Noë refers to it,
causes us to reflect upon our nature as active perceivers. It says as
much about our nature as perceiving subjects as it does the context in
which the work is embedded or the material used to construct the
piece. The patterns of sensorimotor dependence coupling us with our
world, and the ways that our bodily movements modulate our experi-
ence of the world by exploiting these patterns (which are normally
operative behind the scenes) are brought to light through our encoun-
ter with an interactive artwork like Serra’s sculptures. In this sense,
Serra’s work is a philosophically rich example of ‘experiential art’.
Noë limits his enactive account of aesthetic experience to a consid-
eration of sculpture. Though enactive views of experience are receiv-
ing much attention of late, little has been said of how this approach
[6] Described in this way, Noë’s enactive view is clearly influenced by the ‘affordance’ the-
ory of perception developed by James Gibson. See Gibson (1966; 1979).

104 J.W. KRUEGER
might be applied to musical experience.7 I contend that music, too, is

an extraordinarily rich form of ‘experiential art’. In the next section, I
want to explore this claim further. I will suggest that sensitively listen-
ing to music is an enactive process, mediated by sensorimotor contin-
gencies that shape the character and content of our experience of the
musical piece. In short, sensitive music listening is an event of
actively exploring a sonic world.
2. How Do We Listen to Music?

In a certain sense, it seems trivial to say that the experience of listen-
ing to a musical work is mediated sensorimotor contingencies. The
phenomenology of our experience of a given musical work is clearly
shaped by movements we make in relation to the source of the audi-
tory stimulus (such as an orchestra, a band on stage, or a stereo system
sitting on a shelf). So my moving behind a wall or some sort of opaque
barrier, or tilting my head toward or away from the sound source will
clearly affect the experiential qualities of my musical experience in
that context.
But this is only the tip of the sonic iceberg. What I have just
described are causal relations that exist between sensorimotor contin-
gencies and auditory stimuli. However, I want to make a stronger
claim, building off some of the consequences of Noë’s enactivist
model of perceptual consciousness. The claim at play is not just about
cause but about constitution. In other words, I suggest that the experi-
ence of listening to music is actually constituted (at least partially) by
our robust sensorimotor engagement with the musical work. Put dif-
ferently, and to borrow a term from Dewey (1934/1980), sensitive
music listening is a two-way ‘transactive’ process. We enact music
perception via the sensorimotor manipulation of sonic structures. Sen-
sitive music listening is therefore not just an undergoing but is, rather,
primarily a kind of doing. When I speak of listening sensitively to
music, I have in mind the experience of listening attentively and selec-
tively to a work, engaging with it carefully and opening oneself up to
the possibility of being absorbed by the music. The mode of attention I
am referring to is one of sustained perceptual focus. I will call this
‘deep listening’. In contrast, music can be engaged via a more ‘shal-
low’ mode of involuntary listening in which it slips idly by, little more
[7] Iyer (2004) is a notable exception. Whereas I am simply an enthusiastic music listener,
Iyer is a musician and composer. Therefore, his discussion of the embodied nature of com-
position and group improvisation was particularly helpful in shaping some of the central
claims of this paper.

than innocuous sonic wallpaper humming along in the background. I

am not concerned with this latter form of listening. Once again, my
focus is on the enactive structure of the voluntary mode of attention I
call ‘deep listening’.
The claim that musical experience is primarily embodied and
enacted challenges many classical and more recent ways of thinking
about the nature of musical experience. Philosopher Peter Kivy pro-
vides a compelling counterpoint to the view I am arguing for. Kivy has
written prolifically and sensitively on both the nature of music as a
work of art as well as on musical experience itself.8 Over the course of
a number of books, Kivy (1989; 1993; 2001; 2002) defends a view of
music he terms ‘enhanced formalism’.9 Kivy’s enhanced formalism is
a refinement of the ‘formalist’ approach to musical experience
defended by thinkers like Kant, Eduard Hanslick, and Edmund
Gurney. According to this formalist line, a musical work’s form is the
only feature relevant to musical understanding (Kivy, 2002, p. 67).
Since music on its own lacks both representational content and
narrative capacities (i.e., semantic content) — its only real content is
‘tonally moving forms’, according to Hanslick (1986, p. 29) — it is
senseless to describe music (or indeed, our response to it) in emotive
terms. Music offers up no stories, pictures, or other representations for
us to respond to. The appropriate mode of attention for understanding
a piece of music is therefore ‘a matter of attending with extreme vigi-
lance to the composer’s designs in the composed work, following the
composition as it unfolds in the context of what has been heard and of
expectations concerning what might yet be heard’ (Alperson, 2003,
p. 262). In short, we are moved to aesthetic wonder by an appreciation
of a musical piece’s form—and nothing else. Deep listening thus
entails a sustained focus on the dynamics of a piece’s formal architec-
tonic. But it is meaningless to say that we are emotionally aroused by
music since it is in principle incapable of providing us with any kind
of content to be aroused by. Music in itself possesses no emotive prop-
erties. We ought to therefore avoid smuggling in emotive terms when
analysing music and our experience of it.10
[8] Kivy has also had interesting things to say about musical performance. See Kivy (1995).
[9] According to Kivy, this term is borrowed from philosopher Philip Alperson (Kivy, 2002,
p. 90).
[10] To say that music possesses (or doesn’t possess) ‘emotive properties’ is to speak to the
idea that ‘music can be, and often is, expressive of the garden-variety emotions, such as
sorrow, joy, fear, hope, and a few other basic emotions like these’ (Kivy, 2002, p. 31).
Kant’s, Hanslick’s, and Gurney’s formalism thus denies that music has these properties.

106 J.W. KRUEGER
Kivy concedes the obvious objection to this approach: we are in

fact emotionally moved by music. It exerts a profound emotional and
affective grip on us, which is one of the main reasons why music is
such a universally compelling form of art. It follows, then, that music
must possess emotive properties in some meaningful sense. Any view
which ignores this fact is simply inadequate as a theory of music and
musical experience. Kivy’s enhanced formalism is therefore an
attempt to save the basic insight of formalism—namely, that music
lacks representational and semantic content, and thus neither repre-
sents emotions, strictly speaking, nor possesses dispositional proper-
ties of any sort that cause emotions to be aroused in the listener–while
simultaneously doing justice to the clear fact that music is, neverthe-
less, somehow emotionally compelling. Music moves us and therefore
possesses emotive properties. How is this so?
According to Kivy, the emotive properties of a piece of music that
cause us to emotionally respond to it are neither representational (i.e.,
a certain chord represents melancholy) nor dispositional (i.e., a cer-
tain chord always disposes the listener to experience melancholy).
Rather, they are literally in the musical ‘syntax’ itself, embedded
within the overall structure of the piece (Kivy, 2002, p. 91). Formal-
ism assumed that emotive properties must be either representational
or dispositional, and denied that music possessed either. Kivy argues
instead that formalism overlooks a third option: namely, the idea that
emotive properties are ‘an essential part of the syntactic structure of
music’ (Kivy, 1993, p. 258). Once again, they are ‘in the music, not in
the listener’ (Kivy, 2002, p.95) — but they are in the music neither as
semantic content nor as dispositional properties but rather as ‘things
happening in the music, and that I hear happening there’ (Kivy, 2002,
p. 95). In short, emotive properties are ‘being heard events in the
music’ (Kivy, 2002, p. 97). These ‘being heard events’ help constitute
a music’s ‘sonic pattern’: a sonic pattern that, among other things,
‘consist[s] in repetition and contrast’, tension and resolution, etc.
(Kivy, 2002, p. 91). Music — even absolute music lacking vocals,
lyrics, and narrative content — thus moves us because ‘it has human
‘warmth’ … it has human emotions as a perceptual part of its struc-
ture’ (Kivy, 2002, p. 92). And the final step in Kivy’s argument is this:
the human quality or ‘warmth’ of music emerges from the way that the
formal structure of a piece of music, its sonic pattern or ‘contour’ as he
also refers to it, ‘bears a structural analogy to the heard and seen mani-
festations of human emotive expression’ (Kivy, 2002, p. 40). In other
words, Kivy’s idea here is that

… a musical phrase may leap joyously, or droop, or falter, like a person

in motion…music is customarily described in terms of motion; and so
the same descriptions we use to characterize it are frequently the ones
we use to describe the visible motions of the human body in the expres-
sion of the garden-variety emotions (Kivy, 2002, p. 40).
To sum up Kivy’s view: when we respond emotionally to music, we

are registering emotive properties embedded within the ‘physiog-
nomy’ of musical gestures and phrasing — features of the piece’s
architectonic — that mimic human behaviour. Tuning in to these
physiognomic features is the source of our experience of being moved
while listening sensitively to music.
While Kivy’s attempt to save the felt dimension of musical experi-
ence (pace formalism) is certainly laudable, there are nevertheless at
least three problems with Kivy’s enhanced formalism. First, it
overintellectualizes musical experience. Second, it overemphasizes
the ‘fixedness’ of the physiognomic properties purportedly responsi-
ble for our felt responses to a given piece of music. This results in a
failure to account for the autonomy the listener has in shaping the
character and content of her individual musical experience via
sensorimotor manipulation of its structures. Thirdly, Kivy’s enhanced
formalism overlooks the irreducibly situated nature of music listen-
ing, and the important role that context plays in shaping the character
and content of individual listening episodes. For the remainder of the
paper, I will treat these three objections in turn, arguing that an
enactive approach is better equipped to capture musical experience’s
dynamic and malleable character than is Kivy’s enhanced formalist
approach. I will also work to show that the three problems mentioned
above all stem from a single source: specifically, the way that
enhanced formalism mischaracterizes the mode of engagement by
which we listen sensitively to and are moved by the emotive proper-
ties of a piece of music. To be more precise: Kivy construes this mode
of engagement as primarily cognitive in character.11 In contrast, I
argue that music is fundamentally a mode of active perception: an
exploration, manipulation, and drawing out of selected emotive prop-
erties via our sensorimotor engagement with the music.
[11] Kivy writes explicitly that ‘Enhanced formalism has, however, moved the garden-variety
emotions from the listener into the music. The emotions are not, on this view, felt, but
“cognized”. For this reason the view is sometimes called “emotive cognitivism”’ (Kivy,
2002, p. 109).

108 J.W. KRUEGER
1. Knowing without ‘Knowing’

To reiterate, the first problem with enhanced formalism is that it
overintellectualizes musical experience. The theoretical or intellec-
tual nature of musical experience is amplified by Kivy’s claim that an
‘increase in musical knowledge will tend towards an increase in musi-
cal appreciation or enjoyment’ (2002, p. 83). In other words, the more
we intellectually know about music, the better equipped we are to hear
it. This is because, according to Kivy, possessing a broader repertoire
of music-theoretic knowledge (e.g., its history, compositional princi-
ples, theory, etc.) means that a given piece of experienced music
becomes ‘enlarged’ as an intentional object. Kivy writes that
The more knowledge and experience one brings, the ‘larger’ the inten-
tional object will be: the more there will be to it; for the more we know
about the music, the more elaborate our description of it will be, and the
more elaborate our description, the more features, literally, the inten-
tional object, the music, will possess for us to appreciate (2002, p. 81).
This claim is obviously true to a certain extent. An expert architect
viewing a newly-built structure is going to notice salient marks of fine
craftsmanship and design that elude the gaze of the non-architect;
likewise, an automotive mechanic will pick up on the subtle differ-
ence between a ‘good’ rattle indicating a properly functioning motor
versus a ‘bad’ rattle indicating engine problems of a particular kind.
Understanding theoretical aspects of building complex things like
skyscrapers and bridges, and fixing complex things like cars and com-
puters, allows the theoretically-informed expert to notice and appreci-
ate details that the rest of us don’t. Background training plays a crucial
role in shaping much of our experience. And the concepts we possess
as part of our background knowledge often determine both what we
notice and how we come to notice it.
But it doesn’t follow from this, as Kivy seems to think it does, that
the acquisition of music-theoretic knowledge (and the concepts con-
stituting this knowledge) is a process both necessary and sufficient for
deepened musical understanding. The music user can accumulate a
fine-grained phenomenal knowledge of a particular music experience
without the simultaneous acquisition of music-theoretic concepts, or a
conceptually-informed understanding of music experience, in other
words. By ‘phenomenal knowledge’, I mean simply the firsthand
understanding of what it’s like to wakefully live through a particular
kind of conscious experience (e.g., the experience of eating a mango,
giving birth to a child, listening carefully to a favorite song, or smok-
ing cannabis). This phenomenal knowledge of musical experience

emerges from sensitive perceptual interactions with musical pieces

facilitated by the sensorimotor skills that enable these perceptual
interactions. In other words, phenomenal knowledge of music is
detachable from theoretical or conceptual knowledge of music.12 As
Paul Crowther notes, much of the richness of aesthetic experience
flows from experimenting with the dissociation possible between
these two modes of understanding art: namely, ‘a sense of fit or cohe-
sion between our capacity to attend to [a work’s] sensory particularity,
and our capacity to comprehend it in more general conceptual terms’
(Crowther, 1993, p.158).
As a counterexample to Kivy’s claim about the necessity of theoret-
ical knowledge for deepened musical understanding, consider the
experience of listening to music after smoking cannabis. Two well-
documented features of the cannabis high are the strong distortion of
time-experience and the enhancement of auditory perception (Tart,
1971; Fachner, 2006). Listening to music after smoking cannabis is
particularly pleasurable since the effects of the drug often bring about
a hyper-attunement to the structure of the ‘sonic space’ of a piece of
music (Curry, 1968). That is to say, the experience of passing time
slows dramatically and the cannabis user feels immersed in the experi-
ential riches of the present moment. Empirical studies have shown
that cannabis functions as a ‘psycho-acoustic enhancer’ in this regard.
It ‘enhances auditory perception throughout a temporary change in
the metric frame of reference and allows a larger intensity scaling of
perceived musical components’ (Fachner, 2006, p. 339). Lived time
slows dramatically and ‘the space between the notes’ (Whitley, 1992)
elastically opens up, creating novel opportunities for a thorough
immersion in and perceptual inspection of previously-unnoticed sonic
qualities of a given piece of music. Additionally, qualities of the indi-
vidual music-component sounds are perceived as somehow richer in
their phenomenal givenness than during more coarse-grained sober
listening episodes. Different sounds become vividly present, billow-
ing and fluttering as they linger in the sonic space with an uncanny
immediacy; song elements break apart and realize a distance and dis-
tinction from one another that casts them, suddenly solitary and indi-
viduated, with new and subtle shading, nuance and texture. More
simply, the music sounds importantly different than during sober
[12] Bennett Reimer (1989) marks a similar distinction between organizing musical experi-
ence via ‘conceptualization’, on one hand, and via ‘aesthetic perceptual structuring’ of
musical experience, on the other. See also Torff and Gardner (1999) for more on this dis-
tinction and its relation to music education. DeBellis (1995) provides an extended treat-
ment of nonconceptual content in musical experience also relevant to this discussion.

110 J.W. KRUEGER
listening episodes. It is made fresh and transparent.13 And the point

relevant to present concerns is that this perceptual reframing offers
new affordances within the structure of the music-as-heard,
affordances which present novel possibilities for perceptual interac-
tion with and manipulation of the piece-as-experienced. These novel
affordances, I suggest, are new instances of phenomenal knowledge
disclosed independently of the acquisition of any sort of music-theo-
retic conceptual knowledge.14 We enact these affordances via a new
mode of exploratory, active perceiving.
Certainly one does not have to smoke cannabis to open up new
affordances within musical experience. Since the skills needed to
become attuned to novel sonic affordances are sensorimotor skills,
any means of cultivating these skills (e.g., training that does not
involve the use of perception-enhancing drugs) will suffice. For
instance, much recent empirical research focusing on meditation’s
ability to radically alter one’s attentional and perceptual capacities, as
well as one’s affective responsiveness to encountered situations, sug-
gests that contemplative training might potentially enhance one’s aes-
thetic sensitivity and thus lead to deepened musical understanding and
appreciation.15 More prosaically, simply spending a lot of time listen-
ing carefully to different kinds of music might be sufficient in itself to
give one a deep phenomenal understanding without the acquisition of
music-theoretic concepts. Bigand and Poulin-Charronnat (2006) sur-
veyed multiple studies indicating that musically untrained listeners
respond similarly to musically trained listeners in cognitive and emo-
tional tasks related to careful music listening — strongly suggesting,
in short, ‘that intensive musical training is not required to respond to
music in a sophisticated way’ (p. 119).
[13] This sort of perceptual reframing is what leads musician Lindsay Buckingham to write, ‘If
you’ve been working on something for a few hours and you smoke a joint, it’s like hearing
it again for the first time’ (Boyd, 1992, p. 210). Ex-Beatle George Harrison notes simi-
larly, ‘I think that pot definitely did something for the old ears, like suddenly I could hear
more subtle things in the sound’ (Boyd, 1992, p. 206).
[14] Psychiatrist Anthony Corr says this of his experience listening to Mozart after ingesting
mescaline: ‘I was conscious of the throbbing, vibrant quality of the sounds which reached
me; of the bite of the bow upon the string; of a direct appeal to my emotions. In contrast,
appreciation of form was greatly impaired. Each time a theme was repeated, it came as a
surprise’ (1992, p. 40). However, due to an impaired ability to perceive any sort of over-
arching form to the piece, Corr goes on to describe his mescaline episode as ‘a pleasurable
experience, but one which also proved disappointing’ (1992, p. 40).
[15] See Lutz et al. (2007) for an overview of current neuroscientific approaches to meditation
research and the link between meditation and the development of perception and
affectivity,

Our music listening skills mature with sustained practice. This sort
of prolonged ‘deep listening’ is therefore one means for developing
the attentional and perceptual skills that are often temporarily mani-
fest during drug-enhanced listening experiences. Again, the point is
that enhanced listening skills are perceptual capacities that can be
trained and refined. Certainly, formal musical training invokes per-
ceptual, cognitive, and motor skills that give some advantage to the
individual who undergoes such training. But the large overlap in brain
activities in musically trained and untrained listeners suggests that the
human brain is already intensively trained to music through everyday
life experience; adding supplementary training in music schools
makes it possible to acquire specific skills indispensible to be profes-
sional musicians, but it is not what determines the musical ability of
human beings (Bigand and Poulin-Charronnat, 2006, p.126.)16
The broader lesson remains this: our primary mode of encounter
with music is transactive engagement. We enact music experience by
probing, exploring and manipulating both the sonic space as well as
the musical components—the overall sonic structure, in other
words—constituting a given piece of music. To use Kivy’s way of
putting it, we can enlarge a given music piece as intentional object not
by organizing it conceptually but simply by experientially engaging
with it. We can play with the piece perceptually and come to under-
stand it and respond to it more deeply. Importantly, we can do this
without the simultaneous application of music-theoretic knowledge or
formal training.
2. Whither Physiognomy?
The second problem with Kivy’s enhanced formalism is that it over-
emphasizes the ‘fixedness’ of a piece’s purported physiognomic prop-
erties. Recall that, for Kivy, a music piece exhibits ‘behaviour’ similar
to the bodily motions of human beings. It can be jaunty, bouncy,
[16] The matter is perhaps not quite this cut and dry, however. Other studies (e.g., Gaser and
Schlaug, 2003) have found significant differences in brain structure between musicians
and non-musicians, suggesting that the long-term skill acquisition and repetition of these
skills required to become a professional musician brings about structural changes in spe-
cific brain regions. Münte et al. (2003) measured qualitative differences of auditory pro-
cessing between musicians and nonmusicians, and also found that these differences
appear to be shaped by specific musical training (e.g., string players vs. conductors vs.
drummers). It thus appears likely that extensive musical training leads to structural
changes in the brain — and, indeed, differences in qualitative auditory processing. But
these findings, which concern subpersonal alterations at the level of our neurophysiology,
are not inconsistent with the paper’s thesis that, at the personal (or experiential) level, all
‘deep listening’ episodes exhibit an enactive structure. I thank an anonymous reviewer for
pressing this point.

112 J.W. KRUEGER
upbeat, or it can falter, droop, and lumber by heavily, wearily, and

morosely (among many other things). These emotive qualities are ulti-
mately a function of a piece’s compositional syntax, which bears a
structural analogy to the way that humans embody these different
behaviours. A musical piece’s physiognomic qualities are thus fixed
by the piece’s compositional structure.
But a difficulty for this view is that much contemporary music, par-
ticularly music of a more experimental or avant-garde variety, lacks a
clearly articulated physiognomy. A great deal of contemporary exper-
imental electronic music, for instance, lacks the sonic coherence (or
‘contour’, to use Kivy’s (1989) favored term) of more traditional clas-
sical forms. Pieces are often composed by multiple layers and levels
of often dissonant and competing samples, rhythms, and textures
somehow working together in a fragile whole that, nevertheless, fails
to approach anything resembling expressive human behaviour.
Consider as an example the dense, hyper-accelerated and heavily-
processed metallic rhythms of the electronic musician Richard
Devine’s piece ‘asect:dsect’. What sort of expressive human behav-
iour does this abrasive piece of melodyless electronica supposedly
represent? What is this piece’s physiognomy, exactly? (Notice also
that Kivy must covertly import the notion of ‘representation’ back into
his view since it is senseless to say that a token episode of ‘restless-
ness’, for instance, in a given piece of music is identical in kind to a
token episode of ‘restlessness’ in a human being). Or consider the cav-
ernous, slowly-evolving long-form drones by the Italian ambient
composer Oöphoi, which generally lack melody, rhythm and nearly
any sort of discernible formal structure. Despite this architectural pri-
vation, they are nonetheless deeply immersive and oddly moving.
What sort of human behaviour is analogous to their relentlessly slow
unfurling? Or consider, finally, the well-known piece by the American
minimalist composer Terry Riley, entitled ‘In C’. Once more, it is a
great strain on our everyday way of speaking to suggest that this piece
has a clear physiognomy which neatly mimics patterns of human
behaviour, or to speak of certain human emotions as being literally
somehow in these works. These pieces are not selective aberrations,
either. A great deal of contemporary experimental music might be
summoned as an example of ‘physiognomy-less’ compositions.17 But
lack of physiognomic representation doesn’t mean that these pieces
[17] I encourage the reader to move beyond my impoverished descriptions of these pieces and,
using one’s favorite search engine or online retailer of books and music, to find and
engage with some sound samples firsthand. For helpful primers on the history of

are incapable of exuding human warmth, as Kivy puts it. People can
— and many, including the author, do! — nonetheless find these
pieces emotionally compelling.
Investigating precisely how this is so takes us to a related problem.
It is this: by overemphasizing the primacy and ‘fixedness’ of music’s
purported physiognomic properties, enhanced formalism fails to
account for the real autonomy the listener has in shaping the character
and content of her individual musical experience via sensorimotor
manipulation of its structures (the specifically motor aspect of this
process will be discussed in more detail in section three). According
to enhanced formalism, the music listener is emotionally moved by
responding to properties of a piece’s compositional syntax, its con-
tour. These properties are what represent expressive human behav-
iour. Moreover, since these properties are fixed by the piece’s contour,
presumably the range of possible emotional responses to a piece of
music are also fixed — and ultimately quite limited — since these
responses are relative to physiognomic properties embedded in the
music’s prefigured contour. The listener registers these properties
(e.g., the property of melodic ‘jauntiness’, representing an elevated
spirit) and responds accordingly. But music listening is more than pas-
sive registration of acoustic properties, as Kivy’s enhanced formalism
seems to presuppose, and its mode of engagement phenomenologi-
cally richer than one of cognitive pattern-recognition. Again, it is an
ongoing, enactive process of exploring a sonic world. Deep listening
involves ‘processes such as exploring, selecting, modifying, and
focusing of attention’ (Reybrouck, 2005, p. 252). These enactive
processes mean that the listener is capable of much more autonomy
within her listening experience than enhanced formalism allows. We
don’t just discover music. In our active perceiving, we (at least par-
tially) create the contour of our musical experience.
Consider how different listeners may enact and extract dramatically
different experiential content from the same piece of music. One lis-
tener might focus on grander gestures of melodic phrasing while the
other perceptually foregrounds features of a piece’s rhythmic accom-
paniment, effectively nullifying (or at least phenomenally suppress-
ing) the melody and altering how the piece is experienced within their
particular listening-episode. Similarly, listeners can revisit well-worn
pieces and hear them anew simply by perceptually refocusing on pre-
viously overlooked features (e.g., refocusing on bass or rhythmic
experimental electronic music, see Toop (2001); Prendergast (2003); and Collins and
d’Escrivan (2008).

114 J.W. KRUEGER
elements, as opposed to melodic structures). Part of the joy of savor-

ing a favorite piece for the hundredth time lies in the development of
the listening skill to make it become perceptually ‘fresh; that is, to be
able to draw out previously-overlooked qualities of the music by play-
ing with it perceptually — probing and exploring a piece to unearth
new qualities and textures.
Music gives itself as a malleable structure harboring possibilities
for this sort of sensorimotor exploration. Deep listening is the form of
engagement through which we implicitly recognize this fact and, as an
active perceiver, take an active role in determining the emergent phys-
iognomy of a given piece. Importantly, however, the music listener
has much autonomy in creating this physiognomy through selective
acts of attention, modification, and perceptual manipulation of a
piece’s sonic structures.
In a recent work, Oliver Sacks (2007) describes a case that testifies
to the autonomy the listener has in shaping the experiential character
and content of their listening experience. Sacks writes of Jacob L., a
distinguished composer in his late sixties who suffers from ‘cochlear
amusia’, an experience of pitch distortion occurring simultaneously
with gradual hearing loss. A visit with an audiologist found a ‘corre-
spondence between [Jacob L’s] hearing loss and his hearing distor-
tion, both starting at around 2,000 hertz (nearly three octaves above
middle C)’, as well as that ‘his left ear sharpened sound more than his
right (the difference was almost a major third at the top of the piano
keyboard)’ (Sacks, 2007, p. 133). With time and practice, however,
Jacob L. found that he could voluntarily modulate the pitch distortions
— given his extensive musical training, he could often sense when
something was ‘off’ when listening to or composing a piece — and
sometimes diminish them via sustained perceptual attention. Accord-
ing to Sacks, Jacob L. ‘compared this sort of voluntary alteration to
the way in which one might ‘will’ oneself to see a particular aspect of a
visual illusion, such as the face–vase illusion’ (Sacks, 2007, p. 136).
Happily, Jacob L.’s deep listening episodes, which he described as
‘musico-neurological calisthenics’, eventually led to a significant
improvement of his amusia. The enactive character of musical experi-
ence and the content-shaping autonomy the listener enjoys made this
improvement possible.
Again, the point is simply put. Within this sort of focused deep lis-
tening, we enact perceptual gestures that very literally change the
structure of the piece-as-perceived. We manipulate sonic phenomena
into different phenomenal configurations that comprise the content of
our particular musical experience. And it is the sensorimotor

contingencies that mediate the relation between active listener and

music-event that allow this sort of sonic manipulation to occur. Via
this manipulation, musical listening becomes perceptual composition.
Clearly, a musical piece exhibits a certain degree of compositional
structure prior to a listener engaging with it. But it is an open-ended or
incomplete structure that is only ‘finished’, as it were, within the
sensorimotor patterns of the listener’s engagement. The listener’s
perceptual attention and discrimination—their manipulation of salient
sonic phenomena — is what transforms and completes the music
event.
3. Listening in context
The final difficulty with enhanced formalism I am here concerned
with is that it fails to take sufficient account of the fact that music lis-
tening episodes are always enacted within unique listening-contexts.
In other words, music listening is irreducibly situated. And the situ-
ated nature of music listening episodes plays a crucial role in shaping
the character and content of that experience.
Note how enhanced formalism’s cognitivist model of music listen-
ing artificially decontextualizes musical experience. Again, music
listening according to this line is a matter of recognizing the physiog-
nomy articulated within a piece’s formal syntax. But as I have been
arguing, this physiognomy is much more fluid and context-dependent
than enhanced formalism allows. In other words, enhanced formalism
fails to adequately concede the important ways that the physiognomy
of musical performances, for instance, are shaped by situational fac-
tors such as the particular musicians involved, the venue, the instru-
ments used, and of course, the audience. Musical experience always
happens in context: whether a concert hall, an outdoor arena, through
headphones on an early morning bus ride, within a dingy backstreet
club, on a street-corner, or within the familiar confines of one’s bed-
room. And context plays a role in shaping content. Another way of
putting this point is that the phenomenal qualities of many musical
experiences are, in an important sense, social (Goguen, 2004, p.138).
Features of the environment (at times) actually constitute part of the
content of our musical experience.
A vivid example of how this is so is the phenomenology of listening
to live ‘pure’ music, particularly electronic music of a more
dance-friendly sort, or the bass-heavy rhythms of popular rock and
pop music. In a live concert setting, the rhythmic pulsing of the bass
drum, relentlessly hammering out its 4/4 time signature, gradually

116 J.W. KRUEGER
draws the body into an active mode of response — and in doing so

establishes the shared temporality of the music event. Dancing
physicalizes this temporality. But again, this physicalized temporality
is a situated and shared activity. The rhythm and the dancing, consid-
ered as an interactive phenomenon, ‘synchronizes the listeners to one
body — to one moving mass’ (Vickhoff and Malmgren, 2004, p. 19).
To return to Dewey: ‘Each beat, in differentiating a part within the
whole, adds to the force of what went before while creating a suspense
that is a demand for something to come. It is not a variation in a single
feature but a modulation of the entire pervasive and unifying qualita-
tive structure’ (1934/1980, p. 155).
In a live setting, musicians respond to the environmental cues of
their audience (dancing, shouts of encouragement) with their own
sensorimotor gestures (improvisations, alterations of tempo and vol-
ume, the familiar machinations of Rock Star posing, etc). This organic
interplay between performer and perceiver creates a unified qualita-
tive structure, as Dewey terms it, unique both to that location and to
that particular performance. Every performance is therefore uniquely
situated (Goguen, 2004, p. 121). Moreover, this unique situatedness
means that every performance is uniquely ‘embodied, in the sense that
very particular aspects of each participant are deeply implicated in the
process’ of enacting the music-event, including things like ‘their audi-
tory capabilities, clothing, companions, musical skills, prior musical
experience, implicit social beliefs … spatial location, etc.’ (Goguen,
2004, p. 121). Musician and audience are mutually implicated as co-
performers. And musician, audience, and situation all are in this way
part of the enactive dynamic of the music-event, and play a role in
determining the content of the perceiver’s experience in that context.
Throughout this paper, I have been arguing that musical experience
is a sensorimotor process. The remarks above have largely focused on
the sensory dimensions of musical experience: for instance, the way
that modulations of perception and attentional focus shape the struc-
ture of the piece itself, as well as the form of our engagement with the
piece. In the final section, I want to now consider more carefully the
motor dimensions of music listening. In doing so, I hope to round out
the picture of musical experience as a robustly sensorimotor
phenomenon.
3. Music, Space, and the Embodied Self

At first blush, music appears to be a deeply elusive and ephemeral
form of art. This ephemerality is linked to music’s perceived

insubstantiality. Music will often drift quietly in and out of our experi-
ence with little impact (think of the bland and unobtrusive muzak
swirling about the spaces of elevators and shopping malls). However,
at other times certain music seems to descend on us and surround us,
gripping our attentional capacities and summoning a vivid visceral
and affective response. Depending on our mode of listening (i.e.,
active and attentive versus passive and inattentive), we can allow our-
selves either to be enveloped by a piece of music, or we can disengage
and let it recede to the fringes of our awareness. Our relationship with
music is thus importantly spatial. Music both consumes and creates
space. As Merleau-Ponty notes,
… a piece of music comes very close to being no more than a medley of
sound sensations: from among these sounds we discern the appearance
of a phrase and, as phrase follows phrase, a whole and, finally, as Proust
puts it, a world…All I have to do here is listen without souls-searching,
ignoring my memories and feelings and indeed the composer of the
work, to listen just as perception looks at things themselves …
(1948/2004, p. 101).
In addition to inhabiting the everyday space of our waking experi-
ence, a piece of music also constructs a rich sonic world: a spatial
soundscape with textures and topographies beckoning our explora-
tion, inspection and negotiation. The animate body plays a central role
in shaping how we attend to this sonic topography and how we engage
with this sonic world.
A quote from Merleau-Ponty lends insight into how this is so.
Despite a curious absence of music in Merleau-Ponty’s otherwise sen-
sitive analysis of art and aesthetic experience, he does offer this inter-
esting observation about relationship between musical experience,
spatial awareness, and sense of self:
When, in the concert hall, I open my eyes, and visible space seems to me
cramped compared to that other space through which, a moment ago,
the music was being unfolded, and even if I keep my eyes open as the
piece is being played, I have the impression that the music is not really
contained within this circumscribed and unimpressive space. [The
music] brings a new dimension stealing though visible space, and in this
it surges forward … (1945/2002, p. 257–58).
There is much of phenomenological interest in this short observation.
Merleau-Ponty seems to suggest that, as we’ve already noted, the
experience of deep listening is thoroughly infused with representa-
tions of space. By creatively reading Merleau-Ponty here, we can say
that the spatial representations consist of two dimensions: one ‘inner’,
one ‘outer’. ‘Inner’ space refers to the spatial-structural configuration

118 J.W. KRUEGER
internal to the piece itself. This is the piece’s internal compositional

structure; that is, the systematic way that the elements of a musical
piece’s syntax hang together (i.e., how components like individual
tones and rhythmic progression are arranged in prefigured spatial
relations with one another, lending the piece its sonic coherence).
‘Outer’ space captures the spatiality of our experience of music as
being located in the world. It refers to our experience of the way that
music inhabits its own worldly space external to our embodied per-
spective on it — but additionally, it also captures the way that music’s
perceived spatial location in the world contains information about our
own embodied perspective relative to the music’s worldly location
(e.g., perceiving the distance of the sound source from our body).
When we listen to music, we for the most part automatically per-
ceive the piece’s internal spatial configuration. This is what it means
to listen to music understandingly, to hear it as music and not as ran-
dom noise. But deep listening is enacted when the listening self is
experienced as coming to inhabit this structure. Pace enhanced for-
malism, this experiential inhabitation is not simply a perception of
form, then, but is additionally an entering into the form — a piece’s
internal space, once again — so that the listener might actively
explore its sonic topography. Deep listening is the experiential fusing
of these two forms of spatiality within our sensitive listening-
episodes.
So how does this animate body fit into this account? Consider the
condition called ‘amusia’, already briefly mentioned earlier. Amusia
is the inability to hear music as music. More formally, it is an inability
to recognize melody, time-changes and discriminate pitch despite oth-
erwise normal perception of speech and environmental sounds
(Ayotte et al., 2002; Sacks, 2007). There are many forms of amusia,
given that musical experience is a complex experience presenting dif-
ferent points at which they experience might break down. But for the
‘total’ amusiac or profoundly tone-deaf individual, music is experi-
enced as incoherent noise, often of a highly disagreeable character.
Amusiacs will sometimes say that music sounds like a car screeching,
or loud banging of pots and pans.
The conventional explanation of amusia portrays it as an auditory
deficit both (1) related to deficiencies in fine-grained processing of
musical pitch variations, and as (2) confined to the musical domain
and musical abilities (Ayotte et al., 2002). However, recent studies
propose instead that amusia is linked not to a specific sensory-musical
deficit but rather to a spatial deficit — an inability to represent space
(Cupchik et al., 2001; Douglas and Bilkey, 2007). Amusiacs were

found to perform significantly worse than non-amusiac control sub-

jects on mental rotation tasks (Douglas and Bilkey, 2007). Addition-
ally, Cupchik et al. (2001) found a correlation between performance
on a mental rotation task involving three dimensional figures and the
ability of the listener to discern inverse and retrograde musical permu-
tations (i.e., the ability to tell when a musical piece had been played
backwards). Given this spatial deficit, and to give the data a more
phenomenological interpretation, it seems that amusiacs are unable to
experientially enact the fusion of the two dimensions of spatiality
within musical experience discussed earlier — they are precisely
unable to perceive music as having the sort of spatially inviting struc-
ture that might be experientially inhabited — and music thus remains
an alien and impenetrable entity.
The acting body plays a central role in the spatial fusing character-
istic of deep listening. Bodily movements, such as a swaying back and
forth, tapping fingers and toes, and dancing, modulates our perception
of the spatial dimensions of musical experience. Bodily synchroniza-
tion with rhythmic patterns and tempo opens up the inner space of
musical pieces. However, amusiacs have a marked difficulty in syn-
chronizing bodily movements (e.g., tapping of fingers) with music —
despite a normal ability to synchronize with sequences of nonmusical
sounds (Dalla Bella and Peretz, 2003). Put otherwise, they are unable
to enact a robustly sensorimotor form of musical engagement. Amusia
is thus an inability to perceive and respond to the sensorimotor contin-
gencies afforded by inner space of musical pieces.
As embodied and enactive listeners, how we move shapes what we
hear. Jessica Philips-Silver and Laurel Trainor found that movement
influences auditory encoding of rhythm patterns in both infants
(Philips-Silver and Trainor, 2005) and adults (Philips-Silver and
Trainor, 2007). In the earlier series of experiments, 7-month-old
infants were trained by listening to an ambiguous two-minute
rhythmic pattern (i.e., a pattern lacking accented beats). During this
training, half of the infants were bounced on every second beat and
half were bounced on every third beat. As a result, the infants
expressed a more prolonged interest in the auditory test stimulus with
the metrical form (every second beat accented (the duple form) in one
stimulus, and every third beat (the triple form) in the other) that
matched the metrical form of their training bouncing (Philips-Silver
and Trainor, 2007, p.1430). This was also the case when blindfolded.
A further experiment showed that personal bodily movement was nec-
essary to establish this metrical preference. In other words, watching
the experimenter bounce during the ambiguous rhythm training failed

120 J.W. KRUEGER
to establish a preference for either of the auditory stimulus versions

(Philips-Silver and Trainor, 2007, p. 1430).18 A similar set of experi-
ments was later done with adults (Philips-Silver and Trainor, 2007).
Unlike the infants, of course, the adults could engage in their own
‘bounce training’. But like the infants, the adults’ synchronized move-
ments of their body determined how they heard an ambiguous musical
rhythm (Philips-Silver and Trainor, 2007, p. 543). Once again, they
had to personally bounce their own bodies, and not watch a video of
another doing it, in order for their experience of the ambiguous
rhythm to covary relative to their particular bounce training (e.g.,
bouncing on every second or on every third beat). But their sensori-
motor training determined how they enacted the content of their expe-
rience of the ambiguous rhythm.
Bodily movements along with music therefore not only modulate
our perception of the inner spatial qualities of the musical piece and
the outer spatial qualities of the listening context. Additionally, they
modulate the listener’s enactive relation to different features of the
musical piece, such as meter and melody. Bodily gestures are a form
of attentional focusing and the vehicle of perceptual construction. The
animate body becomes a vehicle for voluntarily drawing out certain
features of the piece (e.g., rhythmic beats or melodic progression) and
foregrounding them in our attentional field. This ‘drawing out’ is an
enactive gesture in response to felt affordances within the music. The
listener perceives the inner space of the piece as a space that can be
entered into, experientially, and by doing just this shapes how the
experiential content of the piece-as-given becomes phenomenally
manifest. In short, ‘we hear what the body feels’ (Philips-Silver and
Trainor, 2007, p. 544). What the body feels are sensorimotor contin-
gencies — possibilities for interaction that determine the character
and content of musical experience. Sensitive music listening is thus a
kind of skilled coping with a sonic world, a kind of listening with our
muscles. As Dewey notes, ‘sounds come from outside the body, but
sound itself is near, intimate; it is an excitation of the organism; we
feel the clash of vibrations throughout our whole body’ (1934/1980,
p. 237). Musical pieces are therefore not simply constellations of
acoustic properties or ‘pre-ordained gestures’ (Iyer, 2004, p. 168)
collectively transferred from composer to listener. Rather, a piece is
actively engaged with. It contains sonic information that summons
forth the perceptual and motor skills of the attentive listener absorbed
[18] For samples of the experimental sound stimuli, see the following link:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5727/1430

within its spatial, temporal, and rhythmic duration. In this sense, a

music event is interactively constituted. It is enacted.
4. Concluding Remarks
It has been said that writing about music is like dancing about archi-
tecture.19 Hopefully, the bit of architectural dancing undertaken above
has, if nothing else, reiterated the philosophical importance of musical
experience. As mentioned earlier, a broader conclusion of these
reflections is that musical experience, or what I have termed ‘deep
listening’, tells us important things about the nature of perceptual con-
sciousness. We learn much about how we experience the world simply
by looking carefully at how we listen to music. According to
Schopenhauer, the metaphysical potency of music stems from the fact
that music speaks the language of the noumenal. He writes that ‘music
expresses, in exceedingly universal language … with the greatest
distinctness and truth, the inner being, the in-itself, of the world’
(1966, p. 264). While certainly not looking to suppress music’s
metaphysical power, the enactivist makes a slightly humbler claim:
music speaks the language of perception. Music is experiential art. If
we let it, it discloses important insights about how we enact our
perceptual adventures in the world.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful for comments provided by an anonymous reviewer.
Additionally, I would like to thank audiences in Philadelphia, Kaunas,
and especially Copenhagen for helpful criticisms of earlier versions of
this paper. I am particularly grateful to Dorothée Legrand for com-
ments on a previous draft. Finally, I would like acknowledge my long-
standing debt to Brian Anderson and Matthew Falcy, two stellar
experimental philosophers of music and partners in musical enaction.
This research was in part supported by the EU Marie Curie -
Research Training Network 035975 ‘DISCOS — Disorders and
coherence of the embodied self’.
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Paper received May 2008


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Joel W.

Enacting Musical Experience

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, No. 2–3, 2009, pp. 98–123

puzzles. Musical experience — the experience of listening carefully

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005

of as a rich form of experiential art. I use an enactive model of percep-

1. The Enactive Mind and ‘Experiential Art’

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There are at least two major varieties of enactivism: what we might

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these qualities, Noë insists, are nonetheless ‘amodally’ present in our

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then change how the backside-less tomato gives itself experientially.

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might be applied to musical experience.7 I contend that music, too, is

2. How Do We Listen to Music?

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than innocuous sonic wallpaper humming along in the background. I

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Kivy concedes the obvious objection to this approach: we are in

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… a musical phrase may leap joyously, or droop, or falter, like a person

To sum up Kivy’s view: when we respond emotionally to music, we

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1. Knowing without ‘Knowing’

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emerges from sensitive perceptual interactions with musical pieces

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listening episodes. It is made fresh and transparent.13 And the point

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upbeat, or it can falter, droop, and lumber by heavily, wearily, and

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elements, as opposed to melodic structures). Part of the joy of savor-

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contingencies that mediate the relation between active listener and

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draws the body into an active mode of response — and in doing so

3. Music, Space, and the Embodied Self

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internal to the piece itself. This is the piece’s internal compositional

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found to perform significantly worse than non-amusiac control sub-

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to establish a preference for either of the auditory stimulus versions

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within its spatial, temporal, and rhythmic duration. In this sense, a

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Bigand, E. and Poulin-Charronnat, B. (2006), ‘Are we “experienced listeners”? A

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005

Maturana, H. and Varela, F. (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The realization of

Paper received May 2008

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005

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