Live music can afford novel, transformative aesthetic interactions for individual audience members. Nevertheless, concert research tends to focus on shared experience. In this paper we offer an account of exploratory listening that foregrounds embodied-enactive engagement and affective resonance through close analysis of the music, physiological measurements, and reflections from interviews....
“IPA”, “DES”, “micro phenomenology”, “phenomenological psychology”, “hermeneutic phenomenological method”, “neurophenomenology”, “reflective lifeworld research”, and “ethnographic phenomenological interviews” are just some examples of the many methods out there. While they all claim to work with subjective experience, it is not easy to identify their specificities and differences. When you work...
The Course-of-Experience presents an interesting method for working with others’ experience, drawing on Micro-phenomenology (MP), Enactivism, and Peircean semiotics. It addresses possible applications to cognitive science, answering to a call about how to reliably integrate phenomenological data and experimental methods. I applaud the ambitious framework presented in the target paper, and hope...
Abstract The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less reliable or less valid than quantitative or experimental methods in general. It responds to several skeptic objections such as those raised against introspection, those targeting the unreliability of episodic memory, and those claiming that...
Despite a long history of researchers who combine phenomenology with qualitative or quantitative methods, there are only few examples of working with a phenomenological mixed method-a method where phenomenology informs both qualitative and quantitative data generation, analysis, and interpretation. Researchers have argued that in working with a phenomenological mixed method, there should be...
In this paper, we advance the thesis that music-making can be advantageously understood as an exploratory phenomenon. While music-making is certainly about aesthetic expression, from a phenomenological, cognitive, and even evolutionary perspective, it more importantly concerns structured explorations of the world around us, our minds, and our bodies. Our thesis is based on an enactive and...
Abstract: Based on interviews with the Danish String Quartet, this chapter points to limitations in the philosophical literature that construes musical absorption primarily as involving various forms of reflective and pre-reflective self-awareness. It then shows the paradigmatic experience of musical absorption as being expressed in statements such as ‘It wasn’t I who played the music’ or ‘The...
This paper argues that the Husserlian notion of “passive synthesis” can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of aesthetic experience. The argument is based on two empirical cases of qualitative interview material obtained from museum visitors and a world-renowned string quartet, which show that aesthetic experience contains an irreducible dimension of passive undergoing and...