Music Listening as Exploratory Behavior: From Dispositional Reactions to Epistemic Interactions with the Sonic World.

Listening to music can span a continuum from passive consumption to active exploration, relying on processes of coping with the sounds as well as higher-level processes of sense-making. Revolving around the major questions of "what" and "how" to explore, this paper takes a naturalistic stance toward music listening, providing tools to objectively describe the underlying mechanisms of musical sense-making by weakening the distinction between music and non-music. Starting from a non-exclusionary conception of "coping" with the sounds, it stresses the exploratory approach of treating music as a sound environment to be discovered by an attentive listener.

Music performance as knowledge acquisition: a review and preliminary conceptual framework.

To what extent does playing a musical instrument contribute to an individual's construction of knowledge? This paper aims to address this question by examining music performance from an embodied perspective and offering a narrative-style review of the main literature on the topic. Drawing from both older theoretical frameworks on motor learning and more recent theories on sensorimotor coupling and integration, this paper seeks to challenge and juxtapose established ideas with contemporary views inspired by recent work on embodied cognitive science. By doing so we advocate a approach to music performance, contrasting the prevalent perspective: the sounds produced during performance not only originate from bodily action (centrifugal), but also cyclically return to it (centripetal).

Meaning in Music Is Intentional, but in Soundscape It Is Not-A Naturalistic Approach to the Qualia of Sounds.

The sound environment and music intersect in several ways and the same holds true for the soundscape and our internal response to listening to music. Music may be part of a sound environment or take on some aspects of environmental sound, and therefore some of the soundscape response may be experienced alongside the response to the music. At a deeper level, coping with music, spoken language, and the sound environment may all have influenced our evolution, and the cognitive-emotional structures and responses evoked by all three sources of acoustic information may be, to some extent, the same.

Musical Enjoyment and Reward: From Hedonic Pleasure to Eudaimonic Listening.

This article is a hypothesis and theory paper. It elaborates on the possible relation between music as a stimulus and its possible effects, with a focus on the question of why listeners are experiencing pleasure and reward. Though it is tempting to seek for a causal relationship, this has proven to be elusive given the many intermediary variables that intervene between the actual impingement on the senses and the reactions/responses by the listener.

Music Listening and Homeostatic Regulation: Surviving and Flourishing in a Sonic World.

This paper argues for a biological conception of music listening as an evolutionary achievement that is related to a long history of cognitive and affective-emotional functions, which are grounded in basic homeostatic regulation. Starting from the three levels of description, the acoustic description of sounds, the neurological level of processing, and the psychological correlates of neural stimulation, it conceives of listeners as open systems that are in continuous interaction with the sonic world. By monitoring and altering their current state, they can try to stay within the limits of operating set points in the pursuit of a controlled state of dynamic equilibrium, which is fueled by interoceptive and exteroceptive sources of information.

Neural Correlates of Music Listening: Does the Music Matter?

The last decades have seen a proliferation of music and brain studies, with a major focus on plastic changes as the outcome of continuous and prolonged engagement with music. Thanks to the advent of neuroaesthetics, research on music cognition has broadened its scope by considering the multifarious phenomenon of listening in all its forms, including incidental listening up to the skillful attentive listening of experts, and all its possible effects. These latter range from objective and sensorial effects directly linked to the acoustic features of the music to the subjectively affective and even transformational effects for the listener.

Music Listening as Coping Behavior: From Reactive Response to Sense-Making.

Coping is a survival mechanism of living organisms. It is not merely reactive, but also involves making sense of the environment by rendering sensory information into percepts that have meaning in the context of an organism's cognitions. Music listening, on the other hand, is a complex task that embraces sensory, physiological, behavioral, and cognitive levels of processing.

Optimizing Performative Skills in Social Interaction: Insights From Embodied Cognition, Music Education, and Sport Psychology.

Embodied approaches to cognition conceive of mental life as emerging from the ongoing relationship between neural and extra-neural resources. The latter include, first and foremost, our entire body, but also the activity patterns enacted within a contingent milieu, cultural norms, social factors, and the features of the environment that can be used to enhance our cognitive capacities (e.g.

Music and Noise: Same or Different? What Our Body Tells Us.

In this article, we consider music and noise in terms of vibrational and transferable energy as well as from the evolutionary significance of the hearing system of . Music and sound impinge upon our body and our mind and we can react to both either positively or negatively. Much depends, in this regard, on the frequency spectrum and the level of the sound stimuli, which may sometimes make it possible to set music apart from noise.

Preconceptual Spectral and Temporal Cues as a Source of Meaning in Speech and Music.

This paper explores the importance of preconceptual meaning in speech and music, stressing the role of affective vocalizations as a common ancestral instrument in communicative interactions. Speech and music are sensory rich stimuli, both at the level of production and perception, which involve different body channels, mainly the face and the voice. However, this bimodal approach has been challenged as being too restrictive.

Gazing at the partner in musical trios: a mobile eye-tracking study.

Few investigations into the nonverbal communication in ensemble playing have focused on gaze behaviour up to now. In this study, the gaze behaviour of musicians playing in trios was recorded using the recently developed technique of mobile eye-tracking. Four trios (clarinet, violin, piano) were recorded while rehearsing and while playing several runs through the same musical fragment.

Brain Connectivity Networks and the Aesthetic Experience of Music.

Listening to music is above all a human experience, which becomes an aesthetic experience when an individual immerses himself/herself in the music, dedicating attention to perceptual-cognitive-affective interpretation and evaluation. The study of these processes where the individual perceives, understands, enjoys and evaluates a set of auditory stimuli has mainly been focused on the effect of music on specific brain structures, as measured with neurophysiology and neuroimaging techniques. The very recent application of network science algorithms to brain research allows an insight into the functional connectivity between brain regions.

Music and Its Inductive Power: A Psychobiological and Evolutionary Approach to Musical Emotions.

The aim of this contribution is to broaden the concept of musical meaning from an abstract and emotionally neutral cognitive representation to an emotion-integrating description that is related to the evolutionary approach to music. Starting from the dispositional machinery for dealing with music as a temporal and sounding phenomenon, musical emotions are considered as adaptive responses to be aroused in human beings as the product of neural structures that are specialized for their processing. A theoretical and empirical background is provided in order to bring together the findings of music and emotion studies and the evolutionary approach to musical meaning.

Neuroplasticity beyond Sounds: Neural Adaptations Following Long-Term Musical Aesthetic Experiences.

Capitalizing from neuroscience knowledge on how individuals are affected by the sound environment, we propose to adopt a cybernetic and ecological point of view on the musical aesthetic experience, which includes subprocesses, such as feature extraction and integration, early affective reactions and motor actions, style mastering and conceptualization, emotion and proprioception, evaluation and preference. In this perspective, the role of the listener/composer/performer is seen as that of an active "agent" coping in highly individual ways with the sounds. The findings concerning the neural adaptations in musicians, following long-term exposure to music, are then reviewed by keeping in mind the distinct subprocesses of a musical aesthetic experience.

Music as environment: an ecological and biosemiotic approach.

This paper provides an attempt to conceive of music in terms of a sounding environment. Starting from a definition of music as a collection of vibrational events, it introduces the distinction between discrete-symbolic representations as against analog-continuous representations of the sounds. The former makes it possible to conceive of music in terms of a Humboldt system, the latter in terms of an experiential approach.