Verbalising musical engagement: First-person accounts of movement and emotion in musical experience
Andrea Schiavio, Caroline Owen, Adrian Kempf et al.
Musical experience is consistently described as bodily grounded, spanning overt movement, subtle micro-movements, motor imagery, physiological sensations, and stillness. Emotion and movement are portrayed as mutually constitutive, with bodily engagement not only expressing but also intensifying and shaping emotional experience. A positive association was found between emotional engagement and urge to move. Musical expertise shaped descriptive language: musically trained participants used more abstract, structural vocabulary, whereas dance-trained participants emphasized sensorimotor terms. The findings support embodied and enactive accounts of musical experience and highlight the value of first-person methodologies for understanding how music is felt and made meaningful.