Music Listening as Exploratory Behavior

Dear Colleagues,

Music listening is an exploratory activity that involves perception, affect and cognition. As a time-oriented process, it relies on attention, memory, and expectation. It can be seen as an affordance-laden structure that invites listeners to create meaning for themselves by “coping” with the sounds. Coping, as a survival mechanism, entails cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific internal and/or external demands on the resources of an individual. Applied to music, this means that listeners may search for stimuli that possess benefits, resulting in the management and regulation of attention and arousal, as well as optimal homeostatic regulation.

The aim of this Special Issue is to broaden the scope of music listening to embrace the larger sonic world. Music, from this perspective, is considered as a sound environment, and listening as a process of exploration of this environment. It is an approach that conceives of music as both structured by the composer and musicians, and taking on an idiosyncratic structure imposed by the exploratory behavior of each individual listener. This exploratory behavior proceeds in real-time and can be seen as an epistemic tool for the understanding of music, with a major emphasis on active search rather than passive listening. Several mechanisms are involved in this process, such as the dynamics of attention and knowledge construction, both at the level of sensory information processing, emotional bodily resonance, and higher-level cognitive elaboration.

Prof. Dr. Mark Reybrouck
Prof. Dr. Piotr Podlipniak
Dr. David Welch
Guest Editors

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• music as a sound environment
• music as soundscape
• exploratory behavior as a cognitive category
• broad-and-build theory: broadening the behavioral and cognitive repertoire
• music perception and attentional dynamics
• skillful coping with sounds
• musical affordances
• exploratory listening and homeostatic regulation
• music knowledge acquisition
• musical improvisation as exploratory behavior
• musicality as an evolutionary achievement
• discovery learning

Title: Geometries in sound: the listening experience of sound-based music
Authors: Riccardo D. Wanke
Affiliation: CEIS20 Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Coimbra, PORTUGAL
Abstract: This paper draws on the notion of image schemata (Johnson, 1987) to clarify the perceptual experience of certain pieces within of “sound-based music” (Landy, 2007) of composers and performers such as Gyorgy Ligeti, Giacinto Scelsi, Annea Lookwood, Georg Friedrich Haas, Eliane Radigue, and Mika Vainio (Wanke, 2021). By drawing upon the interdisciplinary bridge which connects image schemata, Gestalt psychology and auditory perception (Bregman, 1990), the paper discusses how the listening to this music has the potential of eliciting a particular engagement which passes through the creation of mental images as geometries in motion, and can lead to cross-modal associations. In applying morphodynamic theory (Petitot, 2011), this paper shows the connections among sound patterns, evoked mental images and cognitive responses. The paper shows how listening to this music can trigger a profound engagement with our bodily experience of the world and it let emerge the potential of a particular music engagement which can be leveraged as cognitive resources for creative and educational purposes.

Title: Anticorrelation of curiosity and mind wandering during music listening
Authors: Juan Felipe Pérez Ariza; Diana Omigie
Affiliation: Goldsmiths
Abstract: Curiosity, a crucial trigger of exploration and learning, has been described as the antithesis of mind wandering, a state of non-engagement with the external environment or a given task. Findings have confirmed that music’s structure influences levels of curiosity in listeners as they listen and as such suggests that this context could be useful in examining the relationship between curiosity and mind wandering. Here, participants were exposed to extended melodies twice during which they carried out two counterbalanced tasks: one requiring them, whenever probed, to indicate whether they had been mind wandering at that moment and the other requiring them to indicate, when probed, how curious they were feeling about the music at that moment. Critically, participants were probed at the exact same moments in the music when completing the two tasks allowing the relationship between curiosity and mind wandering to be examined. Results confirmed our prediction of a negative relationship between curiosity and mind wandering while exploratory analysis further suggested an influence of expertise and the music’s information dynamics on patterns of mind wandering. We discuss implications of our study for understanding music as an exploration-affording sound environment and outline directions for future work.

Title: Signal processing demands for soundscape analysis underlie musical and esthetic listening
Authors: Tjeerd Andringa
Affiliation: ALICE Institute, Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen, Groningen 9747 AG, The Netherlands
Abstract: We investigate and model the signal processing demands of soundscape analysis. This analysis results in behaviorally relevant evaluations associated with approach and avoidance via the concept of audible safety. We show that neuromorphic signal processing with a number of time constants (four) and subsequent pattern analysis allows the assignment of each moment to the standard four soundscape quadrants (calm, vibrant, chaotic, monotonous). The signal processing demands form the root of musical and esthetic listening, which we likely share with other animals. Individual differences between listeners can help us understand why some are, and others are not sound annoyed.

Title: Meaning in music framed: The four ‘eff’ processes (Fit, Affiliation, Facilitation and Fluency)
Authors: Emery Schubert; Anthony Chmiel
Affiliation: Empirical Musicology Laboratory, UNSW, Sydney
Abstract: Music can evoke powerful, positive, meaningful experiences. How do these characteristics come to be in music? Listening to the music itself is critical, but referents (thoughts, ideas, events and affects associated with the music) are also relevant. We found a lack of understanding in the literature regarding the processes through which music is imbued with meaning through referents. To address the lacuna, we built on modern conceptions of framing theory. Four framing processes were proposed, each acting at different time scales (shortest [S] to longest [L]), and with increasingly top-down [T] influence: (1) Fluency [S]—the ease with which the accompanying information (about the music) can be mentally processed, with easy to process material leading to ‘increased preference/positive evaluation of the music’ [IPPE]; (2) Facilitation—the content of the messaging, directly influences IPPE, for example referring to the beauty of the music, or the talent of the composer; (3) Affiliation—when social influences imbue the music with meaning, and; (4) Fit [L, T]—when the other processes have led to long term personal and cultural IPPE through norms and habits. Together, these processes can be applied to provide a comprehensive account of how musical meaning and preferences are developed. Three case studies show how the processes can be applied to extant literature: Why negatively framed music only has a relatively small (negative) impact on IPPE; Why adding crowd sounds to recorded music only has a small effect, and; How ‘labels’ such as Beethoven and Mozart become established, and then impose top-down influence on music’s meaning.

Title: Listening Beyond the Source: Exploring the Descriptive Language of Musical Sounds
Author: Pires
Highlights: —Listeners consistently employed language from senses as vision and touch to describe abstract auditory stimuli. —There are discernible correlations between the subjective descriptors of sound and the objective properties of the sound waves. —Using synthesised abstract sounds focused participants on intrinsic auditory qualities of sound. —Findings provide a rationale for the development of novel paradigms for sound analysis and manipulation.