Accepted Manuscript

Music, empathy and cultural understanding

Eric Clarke, Tia DeNora, Jonna Vuoskoski

PII: S1571-0645(15)00160-8
DOI: [Link]
Reference: PLREV 655

To appear in: Physics of Life Reviews

Received date: 1 September 2015

Accepted date: 1 September 2015

Please cite this article in press as: Clarke E, et al. Music, empathy and cultural understanding. Phys Life Rev (2015),
[Link]

This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are
providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting
proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could
affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
Highlights
• Addresses the question of music’s capacity for facilitating empathy, and whether this empathic capacity can be an agent for
cultural understanding.
• Critically reviews a wide range of literature relating to definitions of empathy, and neuroscientific, psychological, sociological
and ethnomusicological approaches to the understanding of empathy.
• Presents empirical findings relating to demonstrations of music’s empathic potential, including a novel empirical study con-
ducted by the authors.
• Presents an original and integrating model of music and empathy, drawing together the principal components of the review.
• Reflects on the advantages and shortcomings of more and less inclusive approaches to the question of music and empathy.
• Reflects on the risks of an uncritical view of music’s capacity for positive social change.
Music, Empathy and Cultural Understanding

Eric Clarkea, Tia DeNorab, and Jonna Vuoskoskic

a. Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, St. Aldate’s, Oxford OX11DB, UK.

[Link]@[Link]

b. Sociology, Philosophy & Anthropology (SPA),Exeter University EX4 4RJ, UK

[Link]@[Link]

c. Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, St. Aldate’s, Oxford OX11DB, UK

[Link]@[Link]

 ͳ
Abstract

In the age of the internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening

technologies, music has unprecedented global distribution and embeddedness in

people’s lives. It is a source of intense experiences of both the most intimate and

solitary, and public and collective, kinds – from an individual with her smartphone

and headphones, to large-scale live events and global simulcasts; and it increasingly

brings together a huge range of cultures and histories, through developments in world

music, sampling, the re-issue of historical recordings, and the explosion of informal

and home music-making that circulates via YouTube. For many people, involvement

with music can be among the most powerful and potentially transforming experiences

in their lives. At the same time, there has been increasing interest in music’s

communicative and affective capacities, and its potential to act as an agent of social

bonding and affiliation. This review critically reviews a considerable body of research

and scholarship, across disciplines ranging from the neuroscience and psychology of

music to cultural musicology and the sociology and anthropology of music, that

provides evidence for music’s capacity to promote empathy and social/cultural

understanding through powerful affective, cognitive and social factors; and explores

ways in which to connect and make sense of this disparate evidence (and counter-

evidence). It reports the outcome of an empirical study that tests one aspect of those

claims, demonstrating that ‘passive’ listening to the music of an unfamiliar culture

can significantly change the cultural attitudes of listeners with high dispositional

empathy; presents a model that brings together the primary components of the music

and empathy research into a single framework; and considers both some of the

applications, and some of the shortcomings and problems, of understanding music

from the perspective of empathy.

 ʹ
Keywords: Music, Empathy, Cultural Understanding, Resonance, Intersubjectivity,

Alterity

 ͵
1. Introduction

Music is a source of intense experiences of both the most intimate and solitary, and

public and collective, kinds – from an individual with her smartphone and

headphones, to large-scale live events and global simulcasts; and it increasingly

brings together a huge range of cultures and histories, through developments in world

music, sampling, the re-issue of historical recordings, and the explosion of informal

and ‘bedroom’ music-making that circulates via YouTube. For many people,

involvement with music can be among the most powerful and potentially

transforming experiences in their lives. At a time when musicology, and the social

and cultural study of music, have become far more wary of what might be seen as

essentializing and romanticizing tendencies, it is still not uncommon to find claims

being made for music as a ‘universal language’ that can overcome (or even transcend)

cultural differences, break down barriers of ethnicity, age, social class,

ability/disability, and enable physical and psychological wellbeing. There are

widespread manifestations of this belief, including the activities of the West-Eastern

Divan Orchestra (founded by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, to bring together

Israeli and Palestinian musicians);1 and the appointment by UNICEF of classical

musicians to act as ‘goodwill ambassadors’, bringing their music to people in

deprived, war-torn, or disaster-hit parts of the world so as to offer emotional support,

solidarity, and a kind of communion. An extract from the website of the first classical

musician to be appointed a goodwill ambassador in 1997, the violinist Maxim

Vengerov, reads: “1997, September: For Maxim Vengerov’s first official undertaking

with UNICEF, he organized a musical exchange with children from Opus 118 – a

violin group from East Harlem, New York. The children of Opus 118, aged 6 to 13,

 Ͷ
came from three different elementary schools in this inner-city neighbourhood. This

innovative programme has spurred a whole generation to learn ‘violin culture’. Along

with the youths, Mr. Vengerov not only played Bach but also southern blues and

tunes such as ‘Summertime’ and ‘We Shall Overcome’.”2 And from the same

webpage, beneath a picture showing Vengerov playing the violin as he leads a line of

children in the sunshine, is the caption: “In the remote village of Baan Nong Mon

Tha, children from the Karen hill tribe ethnic group follow Maxim Vengerov, in a

human chain, to a school run by a UNICEF-assisted NGO. Thailand, 2000.” Equally,

the 1985 and 2005 Live Aid and Live 8 were global pop music events intended not

only to raise money (in the case of Live Aid) and put popular pressure on politicians

(in the case of Live 8) for the relief of famine and poverty, but also to galvanize a

global consciousness and a united ‘voice’ to act against poverty and famine in Africa:

as Bob Geldof, the prime mover of Live 8 put it: “These concerts are the start point

for The Long Walk To Justice, the one way we can all make our voices heard in

unison.”

In these very public examples of a much wider phenomenon, we see a

complex mixture of implicit musical values, discourses about music’s ‘powers’, folk

psychology and its sociological equivalent, and (in some cases) more or less grounded

or unsupported claims about the impact of music on the brain (Levitin, 2006). It might

be easy to be dismissive of some of these claims, but a considerable volume of

research in disciplines that range from neuroscience and philosophy through

psychology and sociology to anthropology and cultural studies has also made a

significant case for the capacity of music and musicking (Small, 1998) to effect

personal and social change (e.g. Becker 2004; Gabrielsson 2011; Herbert 2011;

DeNora 2013). If music can effect change, and communicate across barriers, perhaps

 ͷ
it can also offer a means of intercultural understanding and identity work. As

Nicholas Cook (1998: 129) puts it: “[W]e can see music as a means of gaining insight

into the cultural or historical other … If music can communicate across gender

differences, it can do so across other barriers as well. One example is music therapy…

But the most obvious example is the way we listen to the music of other cultures (or,

perhaps even more significantly, the music of subcultures within our own broader

culture). We do this not just for the good sounds, though there is that, but in order to

gain some insight into those (sub)cultures. … And if we use music as a means of

insight into other cultures, then equally we can see it as a means of negotiating

cultural identity.”

These and similar claims are frequently either explicitly or implicitly based on

the idea that music can wordlessly act as an agent of mutual understanding – that it

activates or channels empathy between people. Empathy has recently attracted

considerable attention in a number of different spheres. In politics, as long ago as

2001 Barack Obama publicly mentioned an ‘empathy deficit’ as a significant social

issue (in relation to the 9/11 attacks), and has done so on numerous public occasions

since then.3 In psychology and philosophy, particularly in the work of Baron-Cohen

(2011) and Krznaric (2014), empathy has figured prominently in discussions of social

and mental health. And a project is now underway to establish an ‘empathy museum’

([Link] that will open in late 2015 in mobile premises in

London, and then tour to various parts of the world. Of more direct relevance to the

topic of this review, in musicology, the psychology of music, the sociology of music,

and ethnomusicology, empathy has been seen as a way to conceptualize a whole

range of affiliative, social bonding, identity-forming, and ‘self-fashioning’ capacities

in relation to music, with the first conference on music and empathy being held in the

 ͸
UK in late 2013. But what is brought together or meant by the term ‘empathy’, and is

it a useful and coherent way to think about music in relation to its individual and

social effects?

This review addresses the disparate nature of the evidence for the claims about

music’s empathic affordances, individually and socially, across a wide disciplinary

range of theories and findings. From research on music and the endogenous opioid

system (Tarr, Launay and Dunbar 2014), and music and mirror neurons (Overy and

Molnar-Szakacs 2009) to the ethnomusicology of affect (Stokes 2010), the history of

musical subjectivity (Butt 2010), and sociological studies of music and collective

action (Eyerman and Jamieson 1998), the case has been made for different

perspectives on music’s capacity to afford compassionate and empathic insight and

affiliation, and its consequent power to change social behaviour. These diverse

research strands all point to the crucial role that musicking plays in people’s lives, to

its socially binding capacities, and to the insights that it can afford. There is no single

window onto ‘what it is like to be human’ (Nagel 1974), but musicking seems to offer

as rich, diverse, and globally distributed a perspective as any – and one that engages

people in experiences that vary widely along the dimensions of public and private,

solitary and social, frenzied and reflective, technological and bodily, conceptual and

immediate, calculated and improvised, instantaneous and temporally extended. The

fact that music can be heard and experienced by large numbers of people

simultaneously and in synchrony (orchestral concerts, stadium gigs, live simulcasts)

means that the embodied experience of music can also be shared – fostering

entrainment and a sense of being together in time (McNeill 1995). Indeed, some

theories of the evolutionary significance of music highlight the importance of music’s

empathy-promoting aspects, suggesting that a fundamental adaptive characteristic of

 ͹
music is its capacity to promote group cohesion and affiliation (Cross & Morley,

2008).

While many studies have suggested that empathic interaction with other

human beings is facilitated by musical engagement, the direct empirical evidence for

this important possibility is scattered and disciplinarily disconnected. This review

critically examines a substantial body of research evidence related to claims for

music’s capacity to engender empathy, and cultural understanding by means of

empathy’s mediating role; presents new empirical evidence for the empathy-

enhancing effects of musical listening; and provides a model and conceptual

framework within which to understand these phenomena.

2. Empathy

The English word ‘empathy’ is only just over 100 years old, listed by the Oxford

English Dictionary as being first used by the psychologist Edward Titchener in 1909,

and defined by the OED as:

“a. Psychol. and Aesthetics. The quality or power of projecting one's personality into

or mentally identifying oneself with an object of contemplation, and so fully

understanding or appreciating it.

b. orig. Psychol. The ability to understand and appreciate another person's feelings,

experience, etc.”

‘Empathy’ was Titchener’s attempt to translate the word Einfühlung (literally ‘feeling

into’), coined by the philosopher Robert Vischer (1873) in a book on visual aesthetics,

but championed by Theodor Lipps (1903). It was Lipps who developed the concept of

 ͺ
empathy from an essentially aesthetic category (the ability to ‘feel into’ an artwork)

into a much more general psychological/philosophical concept to account for the

human capacity to take the part of, and share the feelings of, another person. Laurence

(2008) gives an important account of the origin and development of the idea of

empathy, tracing a line back to Adam Smith’s (1759) The Theory of Moral

Sentiments, and Smith’s appeal to a notion of sympathy and ‘fellow feeling’ as the

basis for understanding and living a moral life, based on imagining how it would feel

to be in the circumstances of another. The distinction between imagining how one

would feel and simply feeling with another is crucial, since it places Smith’s notion of

sympathy in the domain of imaginative reason rather than involuntary affect, and

makes clear the role of cultural artefacts (paintings, literature, drama, music) as a

means of socially learning that sympathetic attitude. Laurence draws significantly on

the work of Edith Stein (1917) – a doctoral student of the philosopher Edmund

Husserl – whose On the Problem of Empathy also engages with the problem of how it

is that we can know or experience the mental states of others, and whether this

knowledge or experience is given in some direct and primordial sense. Stein’s

conclusion is that empathy is dependent on the mediating role of similarity with the

person (or animal) with whom/which we attempt to empathize, leading Laurence to

propose a definition that emphasizes empathy as both a process, and as a social and

educable skill or achievement:

“In empathizing, we, while retaining fully the sense of our own distinct

consciousness, enter actively and imaginatively into others’ inner states to understand

how they experience their world and how they are feeling, reaching out to what we

perceive as similar while accepting difference, and experiencing upon reflection our

 ͻ
own resulting feelings, appropriate to our own situation as empathic observer, which

may be virtually the same feelings or different but sympathetic to theirs, within a

context in which we care to respect and acknowledge their human dignity and our

shared humanity.” (Laurence 2008: 24)

In contrast to Laurence, Baron-Cohen (2011) provides an account of empathy

that explicitly presents it as a psychometrically measurable trait,4 with a genetic and

environmental basis, distributed in a particular network of brain regions, and

manifested in seven ‘degrees’ – ranging from the zero degrees of empathy of the

psychopath or autistic person, to the six degrees of empathy of some ‘hyper-empathic’

individuals.5 Baron-Cohen regards empathy as a critically valuable human resource,

and sees the erosion or loss of empathy as an issue of global importance that has the

most serious consequences for social health at scales ranging from the family to

international relations.

As is already evident, different authors have chosen to define and characterize

empathy in more or less inclusive or restrictive ways. At the inclusive or more

informal extreme, the term is used to denote a whole range of ways in which an

individual might ‘take the part of another’ (that other being a person, a non-human

animal, an aesthetic object such as a sculpture, a fictional character in a novel or film,

or a piece of music), without too much concern for how that perspective sharing

comes about. In this inclusive approach, a more directly perceptual engagement (a

person hearing the distress in a person’s voice and feeling that same distress

themselves) and a more conceptual and imaginative engagement (a person reading

about another person’s predicament, imagining it, and as a consequence experiencing

– or imagining experiencing – what they believe to be the same thoughts and

 ͳͲ
emotions) are brought together under the same broad terminological umbrella: these

are both manifestations of empathy. But others have taken a more restrictive view – as

indeed did Stein. Stein argued that empathy should be distinguished from contagion

(see below – section 3.3), since in her view empathy depended fundamentally on the

observer retaining a distinct sense of her own consciousness, or subjectivity. Without

such a subjective distinction, individual identity is dissolved, with pathological results

for self-other awareness: the observer is no longer able to distinguish herself from the

object of her empathic concern – with the paradoxical consequence that empathy

itself (taking the part of an other) collapses, or is cancelled out. In Stein’s view (see

Laurence 2008), empathy depends upon sufficient similarity between self and other

for a shared perspective to be possible, coupled with sufficient difference for an

independent perspective to be sustained.

Coplan (e.g. Coplan 2011) is another author to have argued for a restrictive

definition, robustly criticizing Preston and de Waal (2002) for defining empathy very

broadly as ‘any process where the attended perception of the object generates a state

in the subject that is more applicable to the object’s state or situation than to the

subject’s own prior state or situation’ (Preston and de Waal 2002: 4). Coplan argues

that it is essential to distinguish between low-level processes (such as imitation and

contagion) and higher-level processes that involve representations, and that ‘empathy

is a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person’s

situated psychological states while maintaining clear self-other differentiation’

(Coplan 2011: 5). She insists on restricting empathy to circumstances in which lower-

level sensory-motor processes that may bring people into a powerful intersubjective

engagement are mediated or supplemented by higher-level imaginative processes,

resulting in a representation of the other’s states – perhaps activated by, but not

 ͳͳ
directly accessible through, the observer’s perceptual processes. This representation is

a ‘simulation’ in which a person ‘replicates or reconstructs’ the experiences of

another, while maintaining ‘a clear sense of self-other differentiation’ (Coplan 2011:

8) – a strongly cognitivist account that is significantly at odds with the embodied and

enactivist approaches (e.g. Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991; Colombetti 2013) to

human experience that have gained so much ground in the last 25 years.

As this discussion has revealed, there is a significant range of perspectives on

empathy, from which two distinctions in particular can be drawn. The first is the

distinction between empathy as a skill or social achievement – acquired, educable,

and in some sense fundamentally collective; as opposed to empathy as a trait –

relatively fixed, individual, and with a genetic component. The second concerns the

extent to which different perspectives emphasize the involuntary and affective

character of empathy (sometimes expressed through the metaphor of contagion),

involving identification with the other and a loss of self; as opposed to a more

cognitive and deliberate view in which empathy depends upon an imaginative

projection into the circumstances of the other (closer to what Adam Smith called

sympathy). These differences in perspective affect the scope and reach of the term

empathy, and are an issue to which we return towards the end of this review in the

specific context of music. Since the literature on music and empathy is not yet very

large, and in the interests of initially casting the net wide so as to bring together a

rather disparate literature, we adopt an inclusive approach. The following sections

therefore present and discuss the various mechanisms and conceptual frameworks

according to which music and empathy have been understood.

 ͳʹ
3. Music and empathy across different fields

3.1 Neuroscience

An increasing body of neuroscientific evidence indicates the very close coupling of

perceptual and motor functions in the central nervous system, strongly suggesting that

one way to account for the human capacity adopt the perspective of another

(sometimes referred to as ‘theory of mind’, or even ‘mind reading’) is in terms of the

coupling of a person’s experience of their own actions with their perception of the

actions of others. At the level of brain anatomy it has long been recognized that there

are suggestive parallels between the organization of the sensory and motor cortices of

the human brain, and this might provide at least superficial evidence for the close

relationship between perception and action (e.g. Penfield and Jasper 1954). More

recently, however, and particularly in the wake of the discovery of mirror neurons in

the early 1990s (e.g. Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, and Rizzolatti G., 1992),

there has been a surge of interest in the ways in which perception-action relationships

at the level of the central nervous system might provide a powerful way to explain a

variety of intersubjective and empathic phenomena. Freedberg and Gallese (2007:

197) have argued that the activation of a variety of embodied neural mechanisms

underlie a range of aesthetic responses, proposing that “a crucial element of esthetic

response consists of the activation of embodied mechanisms encompassing the

simulation of actions, emotions and corporeal sensation, and that these mechanisms

are universal.” Freedberg and Gallese were primarily concerned with the embodied

and empathic qualities of visual art, but Overy and co-authors (Molnar-Szakacs &

Overy 2006; Overy & Molnar-Szakacs 2009; McGuiness & Overy 2011) have

developed a persuasive model of how the embodied, emotive and empathic effects of

music might be understood from a mirror neuron perspective.

 ͳ͵
 Mirror neurons (or mirror systems as they are often called) are neurons in

motor areas of the brain that become active when an individual passively observes6 an

action of the kind that these neurons are usually responsible for controlling. The first,

apparently accidental, discovery of these neurons was from direct

electrophysiological recordings from the motor cortex of macaque monkeys that

observed reaching and grasping behaviours in other monkeys and humans, and while

the most direct evidence comes from animal studies, there is an increasingly

persuasive body of evidence relating to the human mirror system (Hari 2007;

Mukamel et al. 2010). Mirror systems were first described in relation to visual

observation (monkeys watching another individual reach for an object), but

subsequent research has also revealed the operation of auditory mirror neurons (e.g.

Haueisen and Knösche 2001; Kohler et al. 2002; Dick et al. 2011) – a matter of

obvious significance for music. These ‘as if body loops’, as Damasio (1999) has

called them, provide a direct identification with the actions of another, and constitute

the fundamental building blocks of what Gallese (2001; 2003) has termed the ‘shared

manifold’. The shared manifold is understood as a three-leveled mechanism for

intersubjective identification: i) a phenomenological level that is responsible for our

sense of similarity with others – which Gallese equates with an inclusive notion of

empathy; ii) a functional level characterized by models of self-other interaction; and

iii) a sub-personal level, instantiated by the activity of the mirror neuron system. The

aim of the shared manifold hypothesis is to ground a sense of empathy and self-other

identity in identifiable neural mechanisms without suggesting that human experience

and neuroscience can simply be collapsed into one another: hence the distinction

between phenomenological, functional and sub-personal levels. Gallese is also at

pains to point out that intersubjectivity is not equivalent to self-other identity: mirror

 ͳͶ
systems do not allow us to experience others exactly as we experience ourselves,

since to do so would (ironically) preclude the possibility of experiencing others as

others at all. Our capacity to experience an external reality with content and

behaviours that we can understand is made possible by “the presence of other subjects

that are intelligible, while preserving their alterity character” (Gallese 2003: 177).

At times the mirror neuron idea has been presented as if it were a hardwired

feature of the brain that acted rather like a magic bullet. But as Heyes (2010) has

argued, while one way to see mirror neurons is as an evolutionary adaptation (and

therefore present at the species level), an alternative is to see the development of

mirror systems as acquired through the operation of associative processes (Hebbian

learning) during the lifespans of individuals. From this perspective, mirror processes

originate in sensorimotor experience, most of which is obtained through interaction

with others. Thus, the mirror neuron system is a product of social interaction, as well

as a process that enables and sustains social interaction. A rather specific (and

musical) example of this kind of plasticity is the finding by Bangert et al. (2006) that

trained pianists listening to the sound of piano music showed significantly more

neural activity in the motor areas of their brains than did a matched group of non-

musicians.

A second area within the neuroscience of empathy that has been the focus of

significant research concerns the role of neurohormones in human social bonding,

brought together under the umbrella term of the Endogenous Opioid System (EOS).

Physical exercise has long been known to stimulate the release of endogenous opioids

(e.g. Howlett et al 1984), resulting in the feelings of mild euphoria and well-being that

are popularly referred to as the ‘runner’s high’. Developmental research (e.g. Nelson

and Panksepp 1998) has pointed to the significant role of the EOS in early bonding

 ͳͷ
between infants and their carers; and Domes et al (2007) found that inhalation of

oxytocin (not an opioid, but another significant neurohormone associated with

intimacy, sexual behaviour, and lactation) from a nasal spray increased participants’

success in a ‘mind-reading’ task that involved judging the mental state of another

individual from an image of their eyes. Combining these sources of evidence, a

number of studies have investigated the possibility that coordinated physical activity

may cause activation of the EOS, with consequences for social bonding and empathy.

Cohen et al. (2010) found that synchronised team rowing caused an elevated pain

threshold compared with solo rowing (a raised pain threshold being widely regarded

as a proxy for the release of endorphins); and Tarr (2015) found that synchronised

dance movements to music caused an increase in measures of social bonding by

comparison with partially synchronised, or non-synchronised movements, with

evidence for the role of the EOS in mediating the effect. The EOS has therefore been

proposed as a neurohormonal factor in human social bonding (or in experiences of

intersubjective affiliation), based on a broadly evolutionary argument for the adaptive

advantage of social coordination. Some research has suggested that strongly exertive

activity is required for the EOS to be activated (Cohen, Mundry and Kirschner 2014),

and thus raises questions about the extent to which such a mechanism is relevant to

so-called passive listening to music. Cohen et al. (2014) suggest that routine, or

simply ‘mechanical’ synchronous group movement may not be sufficient to increase

cohesion and cooperation among participants, and that high levels of physical

exertion or shared task-representations and intentions, may also be required. However

a study by Kreutz (2014) showed that choral singing led to increased subjective

measures of wellbeing and higher levels of oxytocin in saliva samples than did an

equivalent period of social conversation, providing evidence for a neurohormonal

 ͳ͸
response in the absence of a high level of physical exertion. And others (Tarr, Launay

and Dunbar 2014) have argued that involuntary sympathetic activation of the motor

areas of the brain during passive listening (for which there is considerable evidence –

see e.g. Haueisen and Knösche, 2001; Bangert et al.. 2006; and for an overview,

Koelsch, 2012, chapter 11) may be sufficient to stimulate the EOS even in the

absence of significant physical exertion.

3.2 Perception-action coupling, empathy and embodiment: behavioural evidence

Mirror systems are one way to understand intersubjective interaction and identity,

with direct relevance to music, at a neural level. At the behavioural level there is

another extensive literature that has sought to understand empathy in terms of its roots

in overt perception-action coupling, and has revealed the significance of mimicry and

synchronization in mediating human relationships in general, and music in particular.

Frans de Waal (e.g. de Waal, 2007) has proposed what he calls a ‘Russian doll’ model

of empathy, based on the idea that evolutionarily earlier adaptations do not disappear

but, like the nested figures of a Russian doll, persist as the precursors of more

complex and developed functions. At the core of empathy, therefore, is what de Waal

terms a perception-action model (PAM) – a coupling that has the consequence that the

state and circumstances of a conspecific ‘automatically activates the subject’s

representations of the state, situation, and object, and that activation of these

representations automatically primes or generates the associated autonomic and

somatic responses, unless inhibited’ (Preston and de Waal 2002: 4). The PAM is not

intended to exhaust the notion of empathy, but is based on the parsimonious

assumption that ‘the same nervous system link between perception and action that

helps us to navigate the physical environment helps us navigate the social

 ͳ͹
environment’ (Preston and de Waal 2002: 20). Empathy in its more complex human

forms is built upon this fundamental perception-action link, but significantly modified

by social learning and the representations (understood as parallel distributed

contingency networks) that ensue. In short, rather like Gallese’s ‘shared manifold’

idea, this is a way to understand the roots of empathy in terms of sensory-motor

contingencies without falling into crude reductionism.

One symptom of such a model (although not a necessary condition for PAM)

is the prevalence of overt and covert mirroring behaviours in human interaction, and

in a review of the extensive literature, Chartrand and Dalton (2008; see also Chartrand

& Bargh 1999) make a strong case for the importance of mimicry in social life,

ranging from postural and facial mimicry to vocal and syntactic mimicry (people

unconsciously mimicking one another’s accents and sentence structures) – both as

manifestations of existing social bonds and affiliations, as well as the means by which

such social bonds may be established (e.g. Inzlicht, Gutsell & Legault, 2012). As

Heyes (2011) has argued, such imitative behaviours may be automatic and

insuppressible, and thus constitute a fundamental embodied basis for a critically

important domain of human social interaction. At a similarly general level, a number

of authors (e.g. Valdesolo and DeSteno 2011) have demonstrated the power of

synchronization to induce altruistic and compassionate behaviours, this

synchronization in many cases serving to entrain people’s behaviours upon one

another.

With this general psychological literature in mind, it is easy to see that music

powerfully affords these kinds of cooperative and affiliative engagements. Music has

long been associated with socially coordinated work, worship and celebration, where

its rhythmically entraining attributes and opportunities for controlled mimicry and

 ͳͺ
complementation (such as in the ‘call and response’ character of many vernacular

musical cultures) play a central role (e.g. Clayton, Sager and Will 2005). Hove and

Risen (2009) demonstrated with a tapping task that the degree of synchrony between

individuals tapping together predicted how strongly affiliated those individuals rated

one another; and in a more directly musical context, Demos et al. (2012) showed that

pairs of listeners who were instructed to rock their chairs in time to music felt more

connected to their partners when they synchronized with the (common) music, the

music acting as what Demos et al. call a ‘social glue’ – binding them together by

providing a shared, synchronized experience. With a younger age-group, and in the

context of more everyday active participation, Kirschner and Tomasello (2010) and

Rabinowitch, Cross & Burnard (2013) have shown that over shorter and longer

timescales children involved in rhythmically synchronized music activities

subsequently behaved more cooperatively and empathically than did children who

were involved in an equivalent but not synchronized activity. Music is a powerfully

multi-sensory, and particularly kinaesthetic phenomenon (see Stuart 2012), whose

embodied character draws people into fluid and powerful social groups at a range of

scales and degrees of permanence and impermanence, and in doing so helps to enact a

kind of empathy.

But of what kind of socially bonded, or intersubjective experience is

music(king) capable, and how is that experience related to the balance between self-

other understanding and the preservation of self identity on which empathy (as

characterized by Stein, Laurence and others) depends? Rabinowitch, Cross and

Burnard (2012) describe a continuum of intersubjectivity for musical group

interaction that ranges from fragmented individual subjectivity at one extreme, to

highly coordinated and interpenetrating group intersubjectivity, understood as

 ͳͻ
intentions, emotions, and cognitive processes shared among subjects. This

intersubjectivity does not obliterate individual subjectivity, but is characterized by

enhanced understanding of, and identification with the other, elicited by the common

(musical) activity, which in turn facilitates the execution of the task. Young children,

for example, synchronize better with a pattern of drum sounds when they believe that

the sounds are intentionally produced by another person than when the source is either

clearly mechanical (and inanimate), or unknown (Kirshner and Tomasello 2009).

Intersubjectivity is thus a process born of, and constituted by, the actions that people

are carrying out, rather than simply a state that they experience. In particularly intense

intersubjective experiences it is anecdotally reported that people can lose the capacity

to differentiate between their own (musical) actions and those of others, eroding the

boundary between self and other within the specific activity – an experience that

Rabinowitch et al. identify as ‘merged subjectivity’. A person making music together

with others in an intensely collaborative manner may literally not know whether

he/she, or one of the others, was responsible for producing an element of the

composite sound.

If this seems fanciful, then it is worth remembering that it is relatively easy to

cause a person to experience this loss of the boundary between the self and even an

inanimate object. In the so-called ‘rubber hand illusion’ (Botvinick and Cohen 1998)

a rubber model of a forearm and hand, positioned in the visual field of a person such

that it could plausibly be part of that person’s body while their real forearm and hand

are out of sight behind a screen, can become incorporated into the person’s body

schema (i.e., can appear to feel sensation) within a short period of time (less than 10

minutes). The extent of this ‘boundary loss’ or merging is indicated by the fright that

is caused to the person if the rubber hand is hit with a hammer. Significantly, the

 ʹͲ
critical variable in inducing the effect is that some appropriate action on the rubber

hand must happen in synchrony with the same action on the (out of sight) real hand –

such as visibly stroking the rubber hand with a paintbrush while doing the same to the

person’s concealed hand. Unsynchronised stroking significantly fails to produce the

illusion. In music-making, it is the coherence, integration, and synchronization of

participants’ individual actions and sounds into a unified auditory scene (Bregman

1990) that elicits the radical integration that is experienced as merged subjectivity.

On some accounts, the condition of ‘merged subjectivity’, which is associated

with active participation in collaborative music-making (choral singing, playing in

bands and other instrumental ensembles) goes beyond empathy, and involves a loss of

self that conflicts with the empathy-defining principle of taking the part of another

while retaining a self-anchored perspective. Passive listening does not ostensibly

provide the conditions for ‘merged subjectivity’ to occur, since it does not involve

overt synchronization between the listener and any other real subject; but Gabrielsson

(2011) provides numerous striking accounts of passive listeners who report becoming

‘one with the music’ (see below, section 3.4). Dynamic attending theory (e.g. Jones

and Boltz 1989; London 2012) proposes that attending to temporally predictable

events can induce entrainment, and a sense of (self-) motion (Clarke 2001; 2005); and

as discussed above, an increasing body of neuroscientific evidence has demonstrated

the extensive activation of motor areas of the brain during so-called passive listening.

This provides one way to understand the strongly embodied experience of being ‘one

with the music’ that listeners sometimes report (e.g. Peters 2010). In a similar manner,

Reynolds (2012) has made the same case for dance spectators, proposing that

kinaesthetic empathy with the dance itself (rather than, or in addition to, the actual

dancers on stage) draws the spectator into an intersubjective relationship with the

 ʹͳ
virtual person, or people, enacted by the dance. In short, something like merged

subjectivity may be a reasonable way to characterize the experiences of listeners or

spectators who are not ostensibly directly, productively engaged with any other real

human subjects.

3.3 Dispositional empathy and music

As already noted, some authors (e.g. Baron-Cohen, 2011) have understood empathy

as a trait, arguing that since some people have a tendency to experience empathy more

readily than others, being more or less empathic can be understood as a personality

trait or a disposition. There have been numerous trenchant critiques of rigidly trait-

based theories of the person over the last four decades or more (e.g. Mischel 1968),

rightly pointing to the situational variability and specificity of people’s behaviour in

contradiction of the idea that behaviour directly manifests fixed traits. As Mischel

(2004) articulates in a more recent review, neither a narrowly trait-based theory, nor

an exclusively situated approach will suffice, and a plausible theory must take account

of the complementary relationship between person-based and situational factors –

indeed will arguably need to dissolve any ‘hard’ boundary between person and

environment (e.g., Heft 2001: 362-70). In what follows, therefore, we make use of the

idea of dispositional empathy without implying any commitment to conventional trait

theory, regarding a disposition as an action tendency that emerges from person-

environment complementarity.

In its broadest sense, dispositional empathy can be defined as an individual’s

general responsiveness to the observed experiences of others, involving both

perspective-taking capabilities or tendencies (cognitive empathy), and emotional

reactivity (emotional or affective empathy; e.g., Davis, 1980). Although a variety of

 ʹʹ
factors contribute to whether or not we experience empathy in a given situation, those

with high dispositional empathy tend to experience empathy more readily across

different situations. Davis (1980) has suggested that dispositional empathy is a

multidimensional construct comprising at least four components: Perspective-taking,

Fantasy, Empathic Concern, and Personal Distress. Perspective-taking can be

understood as the tendency, or ability, to shift perspectives (to see and understand

things from another’s point of view), while Fantasy refers to the tendency, or ability,

to identify oneself with fictional characters in books and films, for example. While

Perspective-taking and Fantasy are typically characterized as forms of cognitive

empathy, Empathic Concern and Personal Distress can be defined as types of

affective empathy. Empathic Concern taps into the tendency to experience feelings of

compassion and concern for others, whereas Personal Distress is associated with the

individual's own feelings of fear, apprehension and discomfort in response to the

negative experiences of others.

It has been proposed that affective and cognitive empathy may have partially

independent neural substrates, the former involving the mirror neuron system, and the

latter involving brain areas associated with Theory of Mind, mentalizing, and

autobiographical memory (e.g., Goldman, 2011; Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). However, it

may be that both affective and cognitive empathy have their bases in neural mirroring

(e.g., Iacoboni, 2011; Preston & de Waal, 2002). Most of the empirical work in this

area has focussed on investigating the potential association between dispositional

empathy and mirror system activity. Interestingly, both cognitive and affective facets

of self-reported dispositional empathy have been associated with mirroring responses

at a neural level. Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh, and Keysers (2006) found that Perspective-

taking was associated with stronger activation of the mirror neuron system in

 ʹ͵
response to action sounds. By contrast, Kaplan and Iacoboni (2006) did not find an

association between Perspective-taking and mirror responses to visually presented

grasping motions, but discovered that activation in the right inferior frontal mirror

neuron area was positively correlated with Empathic Concern and Fantasy, and

negatively correlated with Personal Distress. It may be that the sounds of actions

recruit perspective-taking abilities in the generation of mirroring responses, by

contrast with visually presented actions, precisely because the motor actions that are

specified in sound are not as immediately explicit as when observed visually (cf.,

Iacoboni, 2011).

By contrast, studies that have used emotional stimuli have tended to report

more consistent associations between emotional empathy and mirror responses.

Sonnby-Borgström, Jönsson, and Svensson (2003), using EMG, investigated

participants’ automatic facial mimicry responses to pictures depicting facial

expressions. Those who scored high in emotional empathy displayed more

spontaneous facial mimicry, even with very short exposure times (as little as 56

msec). In line with these findings, Aziz-Zadeh, Sheng, and Gheytanchi (2010)

reported an association between Personal Distress and increased brain activation

while listening to emotional speech prosody (in the same premotor areas that were

active during the perception and production of prosody). Although cognitive and

affective empathy may have somewhat independent functional substrates, it is

possible and even likely that both types of process are involved in any empathic

episode (e.g. Shamay-Tsoory 2011). It is also likely that there is some degree of

interaction between the two processes, as empathic mirroring responses to the pain of

others can be modulated by perceptions of their social behaviour (such as whether

they are perceived to be fair or unfair; Singer et al., 2006).

Several theories of music-induced emotions suggest that some form of

 ʹͶ
empathy may be involved in the emotional responses induced by music (e.g., Scherer

& Zentner, 2001; Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008; Livingstone & Thompson, 2009; Juslin,

2013). The proposed mechanisms range from pre-conscious motor resonance with

musical features that resemble the vocal and motor expression of emotion (Molnar-

Szakacs & Overy, 2006; Livingstone & Thompson, 2009) and emotional contagion

(Davies, 2011; Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008); to empathizing with the imagined emotional

experiences of the performer or composer (Scherer & Zentner, 2001), or with the

music as a ‘virtual person’ (Levinson, 2006). Parallels can be seen between these

proposed mechanisms and the more general notions of affective and cognitive

empathy, or what Goldman (2011) calls ‘mirroring’ and ‘reconstructive empathy’,

respectively. Molnar-Szakacs and Overy (2006) have argued that the human mirror

neuron system might offer a neural mechanism for emotional contagion from music,

and that a listener would engage in a form of pre-conscious ‘motor simulation’ of

those auditory and gestural features in the music that resemble vocal and motor

expressions of emotion, and/or the intentional motor acts that produce the sounds (see

also Livingstone & Thompson, 2009; Overy & Molnar-Szakacs, 2009). Indeed,

neuroimaging studies have shown that listening to music is able to activate premotor

areas related to vocal sound production (Koelsch et al., 2006) as well as larger-scale

motor circuits (Alluri et al., 2012) in the absence of overt singing or movement.

However, it is still unclear whether emotional contagion (in musical contexts or in

general) involves actual motor simulation of emotionally expressive acts, or whether

it is more accurately described as the mirroring of contextualized emotions (cf. Hess

& Fischer, 2013). The fact that listening to emotionally expressive music is able to

evoke facial muscle activation that is congruent with the emotional expression of the

music (e.g., Lundqvist et al., 2009; Witvliet & Vrana, 1996) is more consistent with

 ʹͷ
the idea that rather than directly mirroring specific facial muscle activations, for

example, people unconsciously act out the socially learned expression of a

represented emotion.7

Some authors have suggested that music might evoke emotional responses in

listeners through an empathic process that involves mentalizing and imaginative

perspective-taking. Scherer and Zentner (2001) have proposed that “there may also be

a kind of empathy with the emotion presumed to be felt by the performer that may be

construed in our imagination through an underlying 'idea' that is seen as responsible

for the emotional state that is expressed (for example, the longing of the composer for

his homeland, as in Dvoràk's 'New World Symphony')” (Scherer & Zentner 2001:

371). Others have taken the idea of imaginative perspective-taking even further,

suggesting that listeners might experience music as a narrative about a virtual person

that they hear as inhabiting the musical environment (Levinson, 2006). Empirical

investigations have shown that concentrated music listening often evokes visual or

narrative imagery (Lavy 2001; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2012, 2015; see also Juslin &

Västfjäll, 2008) that can intensify the emotional effects of music (Vuoskoski &

Eerola, 2015). Although parallels can be seen between this kind of imaginative

engagement and the Fantasy subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis,

1980), for example, it is unclear whether it should be regarded as a form of

reconstructive empathy.

One approach to the role of empathy in music-induced emotions has been to

investigate the possible association between dispositional empathy and self-reported

emotional responses to music. Such studies have shown that listeners who have a

tendency to be more empathic seem to experience more intense emotions, especially

in response to sad and tender music (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011; Vuoskoski et al.,

 ʹ͸
2012); more sadness, wonder, and transcendence (Miu & Balteú, 2012); and more

motor and ‘visceral’ entrainment (Labbé & Grandjean, 2014) while listening to music.

These findings provide indirect evidence for the involvement of empathy in music-

induced emotions, but it is possible that the association only exists at the level of self-

report, reflecting participants’ response styles rather than their actual reactions. In

order to clarify this issue, Vuoskoski and Eerola (2012) measured music-induced

emotions using more objective, indirect measures of experienced emotion (namely

emotion-related judgement biases). They found that Fantasy and Empathic Concern –

the same factors that were associated with mirroring responses to grasping motions

(Kaplan & Iacoboni, 2006) – were positively associated with the degree of

experienced sadness (as indicated by a judgment bias towards sadness) after listening

to unfamiliar sad music; but not after listening to neutral music, nor after sad

autobiographical recall. This suggests that empathy can contribute to emotional

responses evoked by unfamiliar sad music, possibly by facilitating emotional

contagion. However, it is impossible to ascertain the exact mechanism of emotion

induction, as it is possible (and even likely) that multiple mechanisms are at work

simultaneously in any given episode of music-induced emotion (cf. Juslin & Västfjäll,

2008).

Another approach that has provided support for the role of empathy in music-

induced emotions has involved providing listeners with explicit instructions to adopt

either an empathic or an objective perspective while attending to recorded opera

performances (Miu & Balteú, 2012). The high and low empathy instructions led to

differing psychophysiological responses and differing ratings of experienced emotion,

with the emotional responses in the high empathy condition being more congruent

with the emotional content and expression of the opera performances. While

 ʹ͹
acknowledging the possible role of opera’s dramatic and verbal semantic content in

these effects, the findings provide the first evidence that perspective-taking can affect

music-induced emotions at the level of psychophysiology. Taken together, these

findings and those showing that both emotional and cognitive facets of dispositional

empathy (i.e., Fantasy and Empathic Concern) have been positively associated with

both subjective and indirect measures of music-induced emotions (Vuoskoski et al.,

2012; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2012) imply that both mirroring and reconstructive

processes may be involved in empathic responses to music.

It is worth noting that dispositional empathy has been associated with the

intensity of music-induced sadness in particular (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011, 2012).

Empathic individuals tend to enjoy sad music more than non-empathic individuals,

suggesting that empathically experienced negative emotions such as sadness can be

enjoyable in the context of music (Vuoskoski et al., 2012; Garrido & Schubert, 2011;

Greenberg et al., 2015). Similar findings have been made in the context of films,

where the experience of empathic distress while watching a tragic film has been

associated with greater enjoyment of the film (De Wied et al., 1994). It is not yet

known what the mechanisms behind such enjoyment are, but Huron (2011) has

proposed that the consoling hormone prolactin might be involved. Levels of prolactin

increase when people are sad, and sad music might trigger this consoling response by

evoking vicarious sadness (Huron, 2011). Although there is little empirical evidence

regarding the role of prolactin in music listening, previous studies have documented

increased levels of another hormone – oxytocin – in association with music listening

(Nilsson, 2009). As noted earlier, the prosocial neuropeptide oxytocin plays an

important role in social bonding and social cognition (for a review, see Heinrichs, von

Dawans, & Domes, 2009), and it has been found to facilitate emotional empathy

 ʹͺ
(Hurlemann et al., 2010). As oxytocin also functions as an anxiolytic (Heinrichs et al.,

2009), it is possible that its relaxing effects might be experienced as pleasant in a

context such us music listening. Although further investigation is needed in order to

understand the role of oxytocin in music-induced emotions better, current findings

suggest that there is something inherently enjoyable in empathic engagement in an

aesthetic context – even when the experienced emotions could nominally be

characterized as negative.

3.4 Music as a virtual person; music and subjectivity

In some of the earliest writing on empathy, Lipps (1903) and Stein (1917) address

how it is that people can identify with, or ‘take the part of’ aesthetic objects, as well

as other people. In the case of clearly representational aesthetic objects (fictional

writing, representational painting, photography, dance, drama, and film) it is

relatively easy to understand how and why readers and spectators might identify with,

or take the part of, fictional characters. Writing of empathic engagement with film, for

example, D’Aloia (2012: 95) describes spectators’ experiences as ‘quasi-

intersubjective’, the characters in the film having (at times) the same direct and

palpable presence as do real others in everyday life. But how – if at all – does this

work with music? In the context of live performance there is clearly the opportunity

for audience members to empathize with the performers themselves, and the history

of jazz and popular music is populated with iconic performers who have been the

objects of powerful empathic identification. Classical music has its own star

performers who may also engage the empathy of their audiences. But classical

musicians typically play or sing music that is not their own, but rather the work of a

separate composer, and often with a display of virtuosity and specialised performance

 ʹͻ
skills that makes the relationship of ‘proximity at a distance’, as D’Aloia (2012)

describes it for a character in a film, seem rather less likely for members of a classical

music audience. And in the case of recorded instrumental music, where the presence

of a person is even more attenuated, there might appear to be rather little scope for

empathic engagement.

But remarkably, people tend to describe even recorded instrumental music in

terms of attributes commonly used to describe the psychological attributes of people

(Watt & Ash, 1998). Indeed, it has been suggested that music is capable of creating a

‘virtual person’ of sorts (Watt & Ash, 1998; Livingstone & Thompson, 2009). Since

the musical expression of emotion bears a close resemblance to human vocal and

motor expression of emotion, involving similar auditory and gestural cues (see Juslin

& Laukka, 2003; Jackendoff &Lerdahl, 2006; Cox, 2011), it has been proposed that

listeners may respond to music as they would to the perceived emotional state of a

conspecific (Livingstone & Thompson, 2009). However, music’s capacity to

represent a virtual person seems to go beyond acoustic and gestural cues that resemble

vocal and motor expressions of emotion. An example is provided by studies that have

investigated people’s reasons for listening to sad music when they already feel sad.

These studies have found that some listeners can experience the music itself as

providing empathy and understanding for the feelings that they are going through,

functioning as a surrogate for an empathic friend (Lee, Andrade & Palmer, 2013; van

den Tol & Edwards, 2013). The participants in van den Tol and Edwards’s study felt

that the music itself (not the actual human musicians) was “empathizing with their

circumstances and feelings, supporting them, making them feel understood, or making

them feel less alone in the way they were feeling”, one of the participants describing

her experience as follows: “I felt befriended by the music – by this I mean that if you

 ͵Ͳ
were to pretend the music/lyrics was a real person, with its lyrics of understanding,

friendship, comfort and confidence, then surely the song would be your best friend,

your soul-mate . . . Music personified is your soul-mate, your trusted secret friend

who can empathize with you” (Van den Tol & Edwards, 2013: 14).

Thus, it appears – at least for some people – that music is able to represent a

virtual person with whom to empathize, and who they can experience as empathizing

with their own felt emotions. There has been considerable interest in the

musicological literature in the relationship between music and human subjectivity

(e.g. Cumming, 2000; McClary, 2004), pursuing the idea that music has attributes

either of an idealized person, or of an idealized collection or community of people.

Lawrence Kramer (e.g. 1995; 2001; 2003) has written extensively about music as the

instantiation or enactment of a kind of imagined subjectivity – not associated

specifically with the composer, performers, or anyone else explicitly and literally

engaged with the making of the music, nor simply as the mirror of a listener’s own

subjectivity, but in a more abstracted and generic manner. John Butt (2010) has

argued for the historical and cultural contingency of such a relationship with music,

viewing the Bach passions (the St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion) as

coinciding with, and contributing to, the emergence of a modern notion of subjectivity

– an important reminder that the idea that music might represent or even enact a

‘virtual person’ is a historically and culturally specific listening attitude. In a detailed

exploration of just such an attitude, Naomi Cumming, focusing on the solo violin

introduction to the aria ‘Erbarme Dich’ from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, writes of

how the listener does not just find her or his own subjectivity passively reflected back,

but reconfigured: “The pathos of Bach’s introduction, and its elevated style, are quite

unmistakable, and recognition promotes empathy. Once involved with the unfolding

 ͵ͳ
of the phrase’s subjectivity, the listener does not, however, find a simple reflection of

his or her own expectancies. The music forms the listener’s experience, and in its

unique negotiation of the tension between striving and grief, it creates a knowledge of

something that has been formerly unknown, something that asks to be integrated in

the mind of the hearer” (Cumming 1997: 17). Cumming identifies three principal

attributes of music that confer a quality of human subjectivity on the musical

materials: 1) instrumental timbre and its relationship to vocality; 2) the rhythmic and

melodic shaping of the violin’s line, and its consequent gestural attributes; and 3) the

sense of harmonic and tonal direction and movement, and the resulting sense of

variations in goal-directedness or drive.

A criticism of this type of approach might be that it is unclear to what extent

such an interpretation is the projection of a highly subjective reading – perhaps even a

purely personal fantasy – onto the material, rather than some more shared response.

Cumming was herself a violinist and a Christian, and is quite explicit about the way in

which these specific experiences, skills and beliefs sensitize and attune her to aspects

of the music that another listener might not pick up. There are questions here about

the relationship between representations of human subjectivity that offer opportunities

for reflective interpretations, as opposed to more directly perceptual engagements that

have the immediate and non-reflective character of the ‘mirroring’ that is discussed in

sections 3.1 and 3.2 above. A skeptic might see accounts such as Cumming’s as

reading more than is warranted into the material, but it is also a fundamental principle

of perceptual learning that expertise shapes and refines the perceptual acuity with

which the affordances of complex stimuli are picked up (Gibson 1969; Gibson and

Pick 2000). Studies of music in everyday life (DeNora 2000; Dibben 2001; Clarke,

Dibben and Pitts 2010; Herbert 2011) have increasingly documented with explicit

 ͵ʹ
qualitative data how richly detailed listeners’ experiences can be, and the complex

relationship between individual differences and underlying commonalities. Focusing

specifically on music’s capacity to afford listeners ways to manage their affective

states, DeNora (2000; 2003; 2013) has written of the manner in which music acts as a

technology for listeners to structure and organize their identities – in the immediate

circumstances of ‘mood management’, and in longer-term processes of identity

construction and maintenance. Writing of one of her informants, DeNora points out

how ‘Lucy’ uses music as a medium in which she can draw a connection between the

musical material to which she is listening, her own identity, and a kind of social ideal.

As Lucy herself expresses it, she ‘finds herself’, the ‘me in life’, within musical

materials, in a manner that allows her to reflect on who she is and how she would like

to be – a process that DeNora points out is not just private and individual: “Viewed

from the perspective of how music is used to regulate and constitute the self, the[se]

‘solitary and individualistic’ practices … may be re-viewed as part of a fundamentally

social process of self-structuration, the constitution and maintenance of self. In this

sense then, the ostensibly private sphere of music use is part and parcel of the cultural

constitution of subjectivity, part of how individuals are involved in constituting

themselves as social agents.” (DeNora, 2000: 47-8)

Music and musicking, then, can be viewed as a rich environment in which

more or less active participants (listeners and makers) can engage with the real and

virtual subjectivities of other real and virtual participants, and in doing so come to

experience (and perhaps increasingly understand) the cultural perspective that those

others (real or virtual) inhabit. Music is in this way both a medium for engagement

with others (who may be more or less empathic or antagonistic), and an environment

in which to explore and experiment with a range of more or less projected, fantasized

 ͵͵
and genuinely discovered subjectivities.

3.5 Sociological Perspectives

In the previous sections we have discussed accounts that consider the possible bases

of empathy from largely individualistic perspectives. These accounts have featured

matters such as individual capacities (for example traits), neurological and other

biological processes, and emotional responses. In this and the following section (3.6)

we turn to perspectives that conceptualize empathy and its musical bases through a

social lens.

As a point of departure, we begin with the ‘new sociology of art’ (de la Fuente

2007), which investigates aesthetic materials for the ways that they may be seen to

frame, shape or otherwise have an impact on and in social life. That ‘new’ perspective

begins with a concern about what artworks can ‘do’ – specifically, with a theory of

how they may be understood to organize action and perception, so as to capture how

the arts ‘act’ in time and space. The more theoretical end of this perspective is

concerned with conceptualizing art as agency, inspired by the work of Alfred Gell

(1998). As de la Fuente (2010a) puts it, our responses to artworks confer on art

objects (or musical objects) a ‘causal’ character, or ‘displaced agency’ that can be

associated with consequences for action. The agency of artworks arises through the

capacity of artworks to ‘abduct’ the agency of the beholder of the work (de la Fuente

2010a: 5, citing Gell, 1998: 14). In a similar vein, Georgina Born has described how

cultural production constructs relations between people, and between people and

things, across space and time (2010: 183).

The key question, then, is how do art works – or musical works – give rise to

forms of agency? It is in relation to this question that the more explicitly theoretical

 ͵Ͷ
side of the ‘new sociology of art’ gives way to more empirical, ethnographic, and

grounded investigations and their associated concern with real time and situated

action. This involves a focus, as de la Fuente observed, on the social life of art

objects, ‘as they move in and through society’ (Fuente 2010b: 220); and on how art

objects come to be connected to a wide range of other objects, practices, stances and

discourses that enable them to have power over us (Gomart and Hennion 1999). Such

a focus points to a level that is neither macro nor micro, but meso – devoted to

networks of people, practices (conventions, operations, activities with histories of use)

and things (Fine 2010), offering considerable scope for examining the question of just

how cultural forms, including musical forms, actually enter into action and experience

(DeNora 2003).

The concern with how aesthetic materials ‘get into’ action (Acord and DeNora

2012) is associated with a focus on embodiment, extension (Clark and Chalmers

1998) and feeling (Colombetti 2013), in which embodied conditions and sensations

are understood both to take shape in relation to things outside of individuals and to

inform cognitive appraisal. Indeed, significantly for the purposes of this review,

bodily sensations may give rise to cognitive appraisals, because, as Colombetti has

described (2013: 46), emotions involve complex dynamical patterns of brain and

bodily events. Colombetti’s account draws upon the work of other philosophers and

neuroscientists to describe how emotional episodes are loosely linked to other

psychological components that include evaluations of situations, feelings, and action

tendencies. Importantly, she highlights how, ‘an emotional episode is not a matter of

biology, so to speak, but depends on available “mental scripts”’ (2013: 47), which

offer categories for organizing and making sense of otherwise complex and

multifarious forms of experience. This is the point at which neuroscience and

 ͵ͷ
philosophy of consciousness meet cultural sociology. And that point in turn provides

the point of departure for a temporally engaged cultural sociology of musical

engagement and thus, of music, empathy and understanding in real time.

The focus on real time cultural engagement and real time cultural attunement

has roots that extend back to Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy and the capacity for

fellow feeling (Section 2). While Smith makes it clear that sympathy must be

distinguished from what we would now call empathy, his focus on the prerequisites

for achieving sympathy highlight the importance of bodily processes. Specifically,

Smith describes how, if sympathy is to be achieved, it is necessary for actors to

moderate their passions (to tamp down, or raise up levels of intensity or ‘pitch’ as

Smith calls it) so as to encourage mutual engagement through shared modalities of

feeling (Smith 1759: I. I. 36-39). His interest in mutual emotional calibration,

understood as a prerequisite for mutual understanding (and indeed mutual appraisal),

resonates with Alfred Schütz’s (1951) concept of attunement, understood as the

prerequisite for making music together. Schütz’s focal example is the performance of

a string quartet, used as a case in point of social action more generally, and the need

for mutual orientation, entrainment, calibration and the gestalt to which these

processes give rise – namely, shared feeling forms. In this respect, classical sociology

can be read as offering important leads for the study of empathy, understood as

emotional and embodied mutual orientation, predisposition and preference. It can also

be read as offering an excellent basis for appreciating ‘art in action’ and the role of

music in underwriting communicative action, or how we bind ourselves together in

time – whether in conversation, or more generally, as Trevarthen (2002: 21) puts it, as

‘the dynamic sympathetic state of a human person that allows co-ordinated

companionship to arise’. Music (and the arts more generally) can be conceptualised as

 ͵͸
offering materials for shaping up the feeling body from infancy to old age, in a wide

range of roles and guises.

But if music ‘gets into’ action, the question, as stated earlier, remains: how

does this happen and (how) can we trace that process? In relation to empathy, this

question can be posed in terms of how shared feeling states, sensibilities and

predispositions come about, and how they can be cultivated and thus also how they

may be – more problematically – controlled (DeNora 2003; Born 2012;

Hesmondhalgh 2013) within actual social spaces and in real time situations. It is here

that the ‘new’ sociologies of the arts offer important perspectives, concepts and –

critically – methods for observing and analysing these processes, in ways that can

compensate for the limitations of the more purely theoretical work discussed above.

These perspectives have been greatly enhanced by Howard Becker’s ‘Art Worlds’

(1982) focus on collaborative production, by Becker’s classic earlier study (1953) of

informal learning in the context of marihuana use, and by the work of the music

sociologist Antoine Hennion. In addition to music, Hennion has written on the

appreciation of wine, and describes how, if one pays attention to a wine, one is giving

oneself over, albeit fleetingly, momentarily, to a thing, in this case, a glass containing

wine. As Hennion puts it, ‘[t]he object also shifts, advances a notch, to deploy itself

and deliver its richesse, involving a more marked contrast and a rising in its presence’

(Hennion, 2007: 105). The agency of the wine, in other words, has – to revert to Gell

for a moment – abducted the agency of the taster, in real time and in a manner such

that the external movements, utterances, gestures and forms of interaction (with other

people, with the glass, the bottle, the liquid, the tongue and mouth…) can be observed

and even, to some extent, recorded. It is here that we can begin to consider action and

orientation in time in ways that highlight change over time. For example: attitudes

 ͵͹
(toward wine) are brought to the occasion of engagement; engagement occurs and

new things are added to the repertoire of ‘tasting’ skills and categories (cf.

Colombetti’s notion of ‘script’ described above); and these new things are taken

away, perhaps to be mobilized at a later time. The parallels with music are clear –

substituting music for wine, perhaps recording medium for glass, listener for taster,

and so on; and the three-fold temporal framework outlined here in relationship to

Hennion’s wine-tasting example has been used within socio-musical studies to map

musically instigated change over time. It has been described in some detail by

DeNora, as the ‘musical event’ scheme (DeNora 2003; 2013), and has been used by

other researchers seeking to specify just how music can be said to contribute to

altered states, conditions, and situations (Stige et al 2010; Stige and Aarø 2012; Regev

2013; Wade 2014).

Influenced by Becker’s marihuana study, and studies of how individuals and

groups (such as women) learn to feel and respond sexually (DeNora 1997; Jackson

and Scott 2007), there have been equivalent studies of the social learning of

musical/emotional experience, such as Gomart and Hennion’s study of how to

experience musical ‘highs’ (Gomart and Hennion 1999), and Pieslack’s (2009) study

of how soldiers engage with music as part of their psychological equipment for

warfare. Similarly, music sociologists have considered how individuals and groups

deploy music or are exposed to music for the purpose of managing and modifying

emotions and energy levels, whether as part of everyday self-care (DeNora 2000,

2013; Batt-Rawden, DeNora and Ruud 2005; Skånland 2012) or in scene-specific

settings such as retail outlets (DeNora 2000). These studies have followed how

individuals and groups engage in processes of modelling, adjustment, tutoring and

directing, and attempted alignment with musical materials, drawing out emotional and

 ͵ͺ
embodied sensations and experiences in musically guided ways. This work helps to

highlight just how deeply culture can come to penetrate embodied processes and

experiences, and thus dovetails with more recent work on the culturally mediated

experience of health and well-being. Critically, this work focuses on how people

become integrated with, take on some of the properties of, and become transformed in

relation to music.

On this point, and standing between the philosophy of (extended) mind and

empirical music sociology, Joel Krueger has observed that music cognition offers an

excellent site for considering extended cognition more generally, and that this

consideration needs to focus on musical engagement in terms of the four Es of

embodiment, embeddedness, enaction, and extension (Krueger 2014a: 211). The 4E

focus highlights the ways in which it is possible to understand emotion episodes as

emerging in the spaces between individuals and social, material, symbolic and

aesthetic contexts; and the focus on emergence in turn empowers the study of shared

emotions. It points researchers to the ways in which emotions, when shared, structure

the agentive character of groups of individuals in ways that, when coupled with forms

of appraisal, ready individuals for action and configure psychological and

physiological features of those readied actors (Krueger 2014b). Music, Krueger

suggests, effects emotion regulation – and thus readiness for action and orientation –

through entrainment processes, in which motor capacities become attuned to and

guided by musical properties such as rhythm. Similarly, DeNora (2000: 76-108) has

described how entrainment processes may enhance bodily capacities in ways that

allow music to become a form of prosthesis, extending the limits of what would

otherwise have been possible without music. Krueger further uses the concept of

entrainment to understand how listening to music – including expressive non-vocal

 ͵ͻ
music – elicits spontaneous facial mimicry mirroring the affective tone of the music

(i.e., happy music elicits happy expressions, sad music sad expressions; Krueger

2014b: 7). Shared emotions arise, Krueger argues, from mutual entrainment through

complex feedback loops. In short, music can take over otherwise subject-centred

processes of self-regulation, and it can do so in ways that may facilitate shared

emotions and thus shared readiness for action. Social cohesion, then, or the enactment

of a public form of empathy, is produced through ‘bodily movements, facial

expressions, postures, gestures, instrumental behaviors, gaze patterns, and

vocalizations with those with whom they are interacting’ (Krueger in press). This

brings music psychology together with philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mind

with cultural sociology’s ‘in action’ perspective – from which it is a short step to

cultural and intercultural perspectives more broadly.

3.6 Cultural perspectives

In this section, we do no more than indicate and relatively briefly touch upon the

potentially vast question of cultural and cross-cultural understanding. Within the

psychology of music there has been an interest in the relationship between possibly

‘universal’ and culturally specific aspects of musical communication, dating back to

the very beginnings of both the psychology of music and ethnomusicology in the

work of Carl Stumpf (Stumpf and Trippett 1911/2012). Among other more recent

empirical studies, Balkwill, Thompson, & Matsunaga (2004) have shown that music

can successfully communicate emotional meanings across different cultures, but

ethnomusicologists, rightly suspicious of simplistic notions of inter-cultural

communication, have pointed to issues of representation, and of the

incommensurability of concepts (or in this case emotional meanings) across cultural

 ͶͲ
contexts, as factors that might undermine the validity of a naïvely empirical approach

(Stock 2014).

Nevertheless, a recent study by Neto, da Conceiçao Pinto, and Mullet (2015)

provides an intriguing empirical illustration of music’s potential to facilitate cross-

cultural understanding. Neto and colleagues assigned 229 light-skinned8 Portuguese

children (aged 11-12) to either a cross-cultural or a non-cross-cultural (only

Portuguese) music education program. The cross-cultural music education program

consisted of 20 sessions involving exposure to (and interpretation of) music

performed by dark-skinned Cape Verdean artists, as well as the study of song lyrics,

cultural context, and singer biographies. Neto and colleagues found that participation

in the cross-cultural program significantly reduced anti-dark-skin prejudice compared

to the Portuguese music education program. Remarkably, the significant reduction in

anti-dark-skin prejudice persisted even two years after the program had finished.

Although it is not possible to attribute these effects solely to the musical component

of the program, the findings nonetheless provide evidence for the potential value of

such applications.

A number of authors have recently proposed the value of a ‘relational

musicology’ that might tackle issues of inter-cultural understanding, including Cook

(2012: 196) who argues for relational musicology as “a means of addressing key

personal, social and cultural work that is accomplished by music in today’s world.”

One specific kind of ‘cultural work’ that has recently been addressed in

ethnomusicological writing that is of direct relevance to this review is the affective

and social work that is accomplished by and within cultures and sub-cultures in which

the public expression and circulation of emotion is encouraged and embraced.

Following the work of Bell (2000), Berlant (2008) and others, and making a link back

 Ͷͳ
to Adam Smith (1759), some authors (e.g. Stokes 2007; 2010; and see below) have

framed this phenomenon in terms of ‘sentimentalism’ – a word that deliberately

engages both pejorative and more positively subversive connotations of the ‘culture of

feeling’ to which it refers. A closely related idea is encapsulated in the anthropologist

Victor Turner’s term ‘communitas’ (e.g. Turner 1997/1969; Turner 2012), with which

he identifies those intense feelings of collective belonging, in which distinctions and

hierarchical differences between participants are blurred. This condition is often

associated with the liminal or transitional states that are incorporated into many

rituals, and with other kinds of social action that stand outside normal social

structures, representing a kind of counter-cultural empathy. Sarbanes (2006), for

example, uses the concept of communitas to argue for the operation of a particular

mode of sociality in the specific context of Greek rebetika music (and its associated

sub-culture) that draws its participants into powerful intersubjective affiliations. She

argues that the state of musical co-subjectivity (cf. DeNora 2000), which characterises

separate individuals simultaneously focused upon a common musical object of

attention (music, or the musicking performers), can generate the more powerful and

empathic state of intersubjectivity: a genuinely collaborative and reciprocally

structured common subjectivity shared between two or more people. To put it

somewhat simplistically, if I witness the same emotionally moving music as you, and

if I believe that you and I have both been moved by it (i.e. that we have had an

empathic experience), this then may cause me to feel drawn into an intersubjective

relationship with you.

Drawing on Adam Smith’s discussion of sympathy and ‘sentiment’ as the

basis for moral judgement, but extended to the flourishing of a number of modern

‘sentimental’ cultures, Martin Stokes (2007; 2010) has provided vivid accounts of the

 Ͷʹ
emotional, intimate and affiliative character of contemporary musical cultures in

Egypt and Turkey, as has Butterworth (2014) in relation to Peruvian huayno music. In

the work of these authors, sentimentalism is understood as a cultural construct or

condition, to which musicking (both the musical materials, and the social practices

that are entangled with them) makes a powerful contribution. It is the rather free

circulation of public emotionality, and the high value placed upon it, by comparison

with the more severe and restrained quality of ‘unsentimental’ cultures, that acts as a

catalyst for empathy, of which music’s capacity to afford emotional communication is

a significant part. As Stokes puts it (2010: 193), one might view “sentimentalism as a

kind of civic project, a way of imagining affable relations of dependence on strangers

in modern society.” This is a very different perspective on empathy – one that sees it

as a social achievement, rather than personality trait; a collective skill, rather than the

expression of a circuit of ten interconnected brain regions (cf. Baron-Cohen 2011).

4. Empirical implications: Can ‘mere exposure’ to music evoke empathy?

As outlined in section 3.2, previous research has shown that music-related,

participatory activities may promote empathy and affiliation (e.g., Valdesolo &

DeSteno, 2011; Rabinowitch et al., 2013). These findings are in line with theories

suggesting that music-making may have served an evolutionary function by

promoting group cohesion and affiliation (e.g., Cross & Morley 2008; Perlovsky

2010). But are these affiliation-inducing effects limited to musical activities involving

actual interpersonal participation, or could passive music listening produce similar

effects? Previous work has revealed that listening to music with prosocial lyrics may

promote prosocial behaviour by increasing the accessibility of prosocial thoughts and

empathy (Greitemeyer, 2009, 2011; Guéguen, Jacob, & Lamy, 2010), and the

 Ͷ͵
research by Neto et al. (2015) described above provides additional evidence of a more

musically-directed kind; but the contribution of the specifically musical component

nonetheless remains unclear.

To investigate whether music listening – without any accessible semantic

content, such as song lyrics – might evoke empathy and affiliation in listeners, we

carried out an empirical study based on a ‘mere exposure’ paradigm (Vuoskoski,

Clarke & DeNora, submitted), using an implicit measure of outgroup prejudice (cf.

Inzlicht, 2012; Neto et al., 2015) as a proxy for the degree of affiliation. We

hypothesized that – should music listening indeed evoke empathy and affiliation –

listening to music from a particular culture would reduce prejudice and increase

affiliation towards members of that culture more generally. To this end, two cultures

with distinct and recognizable musical styles – Indian and West African – were

selected. Since dispositional empathy has previously been associated with sensitivity

to the emotional effects of music listening (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2012), we also

hypothesized that participants with high dispositional empathy would be more

susceptible to the effects of music listening than those with low dispositional

empathy. In other words, participants with high dispositional empathy listening to

Indian music, for example, should subsequently display a more marked implicit

preference for Indian (relative to West African) people than participants with low

dispositional empathy.

Sixty-one adult participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions

(Indian music or West African music) in which they heard either a recent Indian

popular music track or an equivalent West African popular music track of the same

duration, the lyrics of the songs being in both cases in a language (Hindi or

Wassoulou) that was unfamiliar to the participants. Participants’ affiliative attitudes

 ͶͶ
towards Indian and West African people were measured using the Implicit

Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), which measures the

strength of association between categories (in this case Indian and West African) and

attributes (good and bad) in an implicit manner, and can thus reveal unconscious

relative preferences for categories. Following IAT materials designed to measure

racial bias (Cunningham et al., 2001), the stimuli consisted of 12 grey-scale pictures

of the faces of Indian and West African people, and 8 pleasant and 8 unpleasant

words; joy, love, peace, wonderful, pleasure, glorious, laughter, and happy; and

agony, terrible, horrible, nasty, evil, awful, failure, and hurt, respectively. The

Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1980) was used to measure participants’

dispositional empathy.

In the main part of the study, the participants listened (individually, and over

headphones) to either the Indian or the West African music, having been told the

name of the performer and the music’s geographical origin (India or West Africa),

and were instructed to “allow [themselves] to be immersed in the music”. They then

completed the IAT, answered some questions about the music listening task (ratings

of liking and felt emotional impact, and free descriptions of thoughts that occurred

during the music listening) and pertinent demographic questions, and completed the

IRI.

An analysis of covariance revealed that there was a significant interaction

effect of dispositional empathy and type of musical exposure (Indian or West African)

on participants’ IAT scores (see Figure 1). Individuals with high IRI scores showed a

stronger association between positive words and West African faces after listening to

West African music, and a stronger association between positive words and Indian

faces after listening to Indian music. In other words, empathic individuals appeared to

 Ͷͷ
be more susceptible to the affiliation-inducing effects of music listening. Preference

ratings for the musical pieces were not associated with either the IAT or IRI scores.

We also discovered that individuals who engaged in spontaneous, culturally relevant

visual imagery or thoughts during music listening (as indicated by their free

descriptions) displayed a significantly stronger preference for the ethnic group to

whose music they were exposed, though the tendency to engage in culturally relevant

imagery was not related to levels of dispositional empathy (IRI score). However,

because of the method employed, we cannot establish whether engaging in culturally

relevant imagery actually amplified the affiliation-inducing effects of music listening,

or whether those who engaged in culturally relevant imagery had more positive

attitudes towards the cultures to begin with.

Figure 1. The relationship between dispositional empathy and IAT-scores (D-

value), grouped by condition. Pearson correlation coefficients refer to the

covariance between dispositional empathy and the D-values in the two groups.

Positive D-values indicate an implicit preference for West African (relative to

 Ͷ͸
 Indian) people, and negative values indicate an implicit preference for Indian

(relative to West African) people.

These empirical findings provide support for the hypothesis that listening to

music without any accessible semantic content can evoke empathy and affiliation in

listeners. Participants with high dispositional empathy appeared to be particularly

sensitive to the effects of musical exposure, which suggests that our findings cannot

be explained solely in terms of priming or knowledge activation effects (North,

Hargreaves & McKendrick, 1999). Furthermore, the effects appeared to be unrelated

to differences in liking for the musical pieces. We propose that our findings can best

be explained by an empathic ‘resonance’ with the music – a process involving: i)

internal mimicry and emotional contagion; ii) the kind of entrainment of attention that

Jones and Boltz (1989) and Bolger, Trost & Schon (2013) have proposed as the basis

of rhythm perception; and iii) the entrainment of the music’s gestural properties with

listeners’ own internal bodily states that Labbé and Grandjean (2014) have called

‘visceral entrainment’.

Since empathic individuals have been found to exhibit stronger motor and

sensory resonance to the observed actions and pain of others (e.g., Gazzola, Aziz-

Zadeh & Keysers, 2006; Avenanti et al., 2009), it is possible that individuals with

high dispositional empathy are also more likely to resonate with the acoustic and

gestural features of music. Furthermore, as imitation and entrainment in general have

been found to both reflect and elicit affiliation (possibly by increasing self-other

overlap and stimulating the brain system that underlies motor resonance; e.g.,

Chartrand & Bargh 1999; Hove & Risen 2009; Inzlicht et al., 2012), it is possible that

stronger resonance with a musical performance might also lead to stronger affiliation.

 Ͷ͹
An intriguing possibility is the potential contribution of the social neuropeptide

oxytocin that is associated with social bonding and affiliation (for a review, see

Heinrichs et al., 2009). Although Sheng et al. (2013), in a study that used intranasally

administered oxytocin, found increased in-group favouritism rather than increased

affiliation for an out-group, it is nevertheless possible that oxytocin may have

contributed to the effects observed in the present study. Elevated levels of oxytocin

have previously been documented in association with music listening (Nilsson, 2009)

and choral singing (Kreutz, 2014), suggesting that musical activities can at least

temporarily increase oxytocin levels. If this were true in our study, it may have led to

the increased sense of affiliation to the specific music (and its associated culture) to

which each group of listeners was exposed. Further investigation is needed to

understand the phenomenon more fully, but this initial study has provided preliminary

evidence for the factors that may be involved.

5. Model, Applications, and Implications

5.1 A model of music and empathy

The result of our empirical study provides some evidence for the capacity of music –

even when encountered in arguably the most passive circumstances (solitary

headphone listening in a ‘laboratory’ setting) – to positively influence people’s

unconscious attitudes towards cultural others. Specifically, people with higher

dispositional empathy scores show more differentiated positive associations with

images of people from two different cultural groups after listening to music explicitly

belonging to one of the cultural groups than do people with lower dispositional

empathy scores. This is a striking result, and provides what might be characterized as

narrow but ‘hard-nosed’ evidence for music’s positive inter-cultural potential, and we

 Ͷͺ
have speculated on the broad psychological mechanisms (including entrainment,

mimicry, emotional contagion, and semantic elaboration) that may be responsible.

Having critically reviewed a broad range of evidence and theory relating to

music, empathy and intercultural understanding, and having briefly presented the

outcome of our own empirical study (reported fully in Vuoskoski, Clarke & DeNora

submitted), we now turn to a summarizing and integrating model that is intended to

organize and focus the wide range of elements and processes that have been discussed

so far (see Figure 2). The model is intended primarily to represent the empathic

engagement of a listener with musical events presented across a range of

circumstances (live and recorded, in the concert hall, at home, out clubbing with

friends); and while we present an apparently solitary listener (in part to reflect the

circumstances under which our own empirical study was conducted), we view the

model as applying equally to collective listening circumstances, with appropriate

modifications (as we outline below).

 Ͷͻ
 Figure 2. A model of musical empathic engagement, from a listening

perspective. Numbers in the model (1 to 13) relate to explanations and

discussions in the text below.

The model is understood as functioning as follows, with bracketed numbers in the text

referring to corresponding parts of Fig. 2:

• A listener (1) engages with musical events (2) that may be the immediate live

manifestation of a musician or a group of musicians, or may be the recorded or

broadcast sounds (and perhaps associated images) that specify the actions of real or

imagined musicians.

 ͷͲ
• This engagement takes place in reciprocal relationship with a dynamic

social/cultural context (3) that both embeds and constitutes this engagement, and is in

turn partially constituted by it.

• Among many other attributes, listeners may be characterized by their empathic

dispositions (4) – which may be measurable by the IRI or Empathy Quotient (Davis,

1980; Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004), for example. These are in turn the

consequence of the listeners’ contagious susceptibilities (5), dynamically shaped by

developmental and social factors that operate over the lifespan of the individual. As

noted above (Section 3.3), empathic disposition is i) understood as an environment-

complementary action tendency, rather than a fixed trait; and ii) despite appearing to

be the only ‘person attribute’ in the model, is neither an attribute in that narrow sense,

nor (of course) the only such complementary action tendency.

• Based on our review of the literature, we propose five principal channels of primary

empathic engagement, or ‘resonance’ (Goldie, 2011):

– Perceptuo-motor resonance (6) arising out of the more or less physical (from

dancing and singing along, to passive attentiveness) engagement with musical

materials that vary in their ‘liveness’ or presence (from live musicians, to

poorly reproduced telephone-hold music, for example).

– Synchronization or entrainment (7) resulting from aimed attention (Jones &

Boltz, 1989) engaging with the entraining affordances (rhythmically specified)

of the musical events.

 ͷͳ
 – Perceptual-cognitive resonance (8), arising from the style competence of the

listener in relation to the stylistic familiarity/novelty of the musical events.

– Mimetic resonance (10), arising from the variable tendency to hear musical

events in ‘anthropomorphic’ or more broadly animated ways (e.g., Stern,

2010), according to their gestural, vocal or dynamic qualities; and

incorporating mirror neuron and other components of perception-action

mimicry.

– Affective resonance (9), arising from the listener’s affective competence and

sensitivity in relation to the expressive properties of the musical events. This

resonant relationship is shown as overlapping with both perceptual-cognitive

resonance (8) and mimetic resonance (10), in recognition of the fact that style

properties (8) and the gestural properties (10) constitute important parts of (but

do not exhaust) the expressive musical properties. Affective resonance

represents a significant component of what a listener experiences as his/her

liking of, or preference for, the music – although liking or preference is not

reducible to affective resonance alone.

• As discussed above (section 3.4, references to Lee, Andrade & Palmer, 2013; and

van den Tol and Edwards, 2013), listeners on occasion describe experiences in which

they feel themselves to be the object of music’s empathy – a reversal of the

subject/object relationship between listener and musical material that is normally

assumed to hold. This subject/object indeterminacy or fluidity is, however, entirely

consistent with the type of ‘merged subjectivity’ (Rabinowitch, Cross, & Burnard,

 ͷʹ
2012) or ‘loss of self’ (Clarke 2014) that intense engagement through music can

afford. The model is therefore to be understood as genuinely having the bi-

directionality that the five central double-headed arrows indicate.

• One of the consequences of perceptuo-motor resonance (6),

synchronization/entrainment (7), and affective resonance (9) may be the release of a

variety of neurohormones (11) (Tarr, Launay, & Dunbar, 2014) which have a direct

impact on social bonding and empathy, with potentially feed-forward effects

(heightened social bonding leading to greater affective resonance, entrainment and

perceptuo-motor resonance; leading in turn to increased neuro-hormonal activation;

and so on).

• An array of social and cultural factors (3) modulate and mediate all of these

resonance channels, of which we identify four broad example categories: i) the social

context, which may vary along a continuum from remote and dispassionate (detached,

discriminatory listening – as by an adjudicator in a performance competition) to

engaged and immersive (club dancing); ii) the cultural ‘style’, which may vary along

a continuum from affectively restrained (a highly controlled or affectively inhibited

cultural context), to affectively demonstrative (e.g., the Egyptian or Turkish contexts

that Stokes (2007; 2010) documents); iii) the cultural and historical prevalence or

absence of the cultural construct of “music as a virtual person” – as documented by

e.g. Butt (2010); and iv) the practical context, which may range from the

disinterestedly analytical to the committedly therapeutic (e.g. Ansdell, 1995).

 ͷ͵
• Finally, while the musical events (2) may themselves constitute a sufficient

environment within which these empathic processes play themselves out, there is a

marked tendency to hear those events as the products of, or specifiers for, one or more

real or virtual persons (12), such that the listener is brought into empathic relation

with that person/people. Those people, and indeed the musical materials themselves,

belong to their own wider cultural context (13), such that that the empathic listener is

brought into empathic relationship with the culture more generally.9 It is in this way

that music, empathy, and cultural understanding may be brought together.

Our purpose in presenting this model is to give some order and focus to the

considerable diversity of factors and associated conceptual frameworks that have been

proposed as components of the complex relationship between music, empathy and

culture. The aim of the model is to provide clarity, but there are inevitably risks in

presenting a ‘boxes and arrows’ account of a multidimensional phenomenon of

considerable complexity. The most obvious of these is the rather stark subject-object,

person-environment, or listener-music dualism that dominates the structure of the

diagram, against which we have elsewhere argued strongly (e.g. Clarke 2005, 2014;

DeNora 2000, 2013). We justify the approach here, however, on the basis of its utility

as an initial ground-clearing operation, and as an admittedly over-simplified first

attempt at a model that we hope will become more sophisticated and refined. A

second, and related, shortcoming is the apparently very ‘solitary’ perspective that the

model seems to imply. As already mentioned, we do this in part as a reflection of the

rather solitary nature of our own empirical study, and in part to avoid visual clutter.

However, we conceive of the model as being adaptable to a more collective

perspective, by imagining a ‘multiplication’ of the upper half of the diagram for

 ͷͶ
different circumstances. If we imagine a club dance context, for example, with 120

people in a room, and around 12 listener-dancers in reasonably immediate proximity

to one another, we could imagine (though it might be hard to represent!) a 12-fold

multiplication of the upper part of the diagram, with each individual listener-dancer

(1) embodying his or her own empathic disposition (4) and susceptibility to contagion

(5), engaging with the music according to his or her particular ‘tuning’ of the five

resonant principles (6 – 10), and bringing their own somewhat different expression of

their social and cultural context (3). However in addition to this simply additive

elaboration, the model also suggests and can (in principle) represent the potentially

powerful interactions or additionally emergent factors that we would anticipate:

contagion between individuals, inter-personal mimicry and synchronization or

entrainment (particularly in the case of listeners dancing together), and either the

collective dis-inhibition or inhibition that can be elicited under such circumstances. In

a similar manner, though with rather different specific features, the collective

listening circumstances of the standard Western concert hall audience can be modeled

by the same principle of ‘multiplication’ combined with the dynamics of genuinely

co-subjective and intersubjective factors. In these and other ways, the ecologically

distributed (cf. Hutchins 1995, 2010; Heft 2001) character of empathic engagement

can be progressively built into the current ‘base’ model, and while not wishing to

imply that these significant considerations can be quickly or simply solved, we do not

regard these as fundamental or insuperable shortcomings.

5.2 Application

In the light of our model, and having considered a number of conceptual frameworks

and possible mechanisms to understand music’s empathic potential, we now turn to a

 ͷͷ
domain in which this empathic character finds practical application. In more or less

formal and informal ways, music has been involved in therapy and well-being for

millennia, and while there are many dimensions to music’s therapeutic value (such as

the exercise of motor skills, bolstering of self-esteem, cathartic release), a central

quality is music’s capacity to act as a medium of empathic communication. In the

active engagement between a therapist and client that characterises creative music

therapy (Nordoff & Robbins 1977), the most fundamental principle is for the therapist

to find (through improvisation) a type of music that makes contact with, reassures,

and engages a possibly distressed, frustrated, fearful, or isolated client. As the

documentation of music therapy sessions illustrates, imitation or other kinds of semi-

imitative or complementary mirroring are the standard methods in creative music

therapy for ‘making contact with’ or ‘holding’ a music therapy client; and this kind of

mirroring is often the first step in establishing a perhaps subsequently more complex

relationship with the client. One way to understand this is as an enactment of empathy

by the therapist with the client, enacting through music the empathy that the therapist

has for the client’s feelings of (e.g.) isolation, frustration, anger, fear. Drawing on

their Shared Affective Motion Experience (SAME) model, Molnar-Szakacs, Assuied

and Overy (2012) argue that music is heard not as abstract and disembodied sounds,

but as the physical actions and gestures of another person, and that finding a ‘common

music’ that therapist and client can play together (with the therapist usually in the role

of adapting to the client’s music – meeting the client in his or her own musical space)

is the musical enactment of empathy: taking the part of the other.

The focus on music, health and well-being is a growing area (Koen et al 2008;

MacDonald et al 2012; MacDonald 2013). It encompasses music therapeutic

perspectives, community music, psychotherapeutic perspectives and more overtly

 ͷ͸
medical applications as well as the history of medicine and healing. At the level of the

individual, and in overtly medical contexts, research in these areas has documented

music’s potential for the management of pain (Edwards 1995; Hanser 2010), anxiety

(Drahota et al 2012), palliative care (Aasgaard 2002; Archie et al 2013; DeNora

2012), and immunology (Fancourt et al 2013; Chanda and Levitin 2013), all of which

emphasise mind-body-culture interactions; and at the broader level, where music

connects with and can be seen to contribute to well-being, music has been described

ecologically as part of a heterogeneous salutogenic (health-promoting) space (DeNora

2013). In a variety of ways, all of this work engages with considerations of empathy –

understood as sensibility, perception and orientation – as musically mediated.

Specifically, the focus on the malleability of consciousness and self-perception

(Clarke and Clarke 2011) points to a human capacity for entering into different modes

of awareness that are simultaneously sensitizing (aesthetic) and desensitizing

(anaesthetic), and in so doing indicates the importance – and power – of the cultural

technologies through which alternative states can be achieved.

The case of music and pain management illustrates many aspects of this

theme. As Hanser (2010) has described it, recent theoretical understandings of pain

have moved toward a multi-dimensional conception of pain perception, in which pain

is not unmediated but rather comes to be experienced in relation to cultural and

situated interventions, including music. In part, musical stimuli simply compete with

neural pain messages; but more interestingly, music stimulates both oxytocin and

embodied sympathetic responses (Grape et al., 2002; Hurlemann et al., 2010). Recent

interdisciplinary perspectives highlight how music, in tandem with other biographical

and contextual factors, may lead a person in pain into alternative situations, ones in

which she or he becomes sensitized to musically inspired associations and

 ͷ͹
desensitized to the former situation of being in pain. Thus, music cannot necessarily

address the cause of pain but it can redirect sensations of pain by capturing

consciousness in ways that recalibrate them (DeNora 2013). So too, in the Bonny

Method of Guided Imagery and Music (Bonde 2012) music may provide a grid or

template against which knowledge-production (memory, self- and mutual-

understanding, historical accounts) can be elaborated and scaffolded in ways that can

be used to diminish ‘negative’ emotions and associations, effectively recalibrating

perception and, in this case, the self-perception of pain.

More generally, and in ways that draw music therapy and music and conflict

resolution into dialogue, musical engagement may be used to transform psycho-social

situations, again leading the actor or actors away from the perception of distressing

features of the body or environment, and toward more positive features and scenarios,

in ways that may also contribute to hope, patience and general mental well-being

(Ansdell et al 2010; Ansdell 2014), as well as broader forms of cross-cultural and

interactional accord, linked to music and guided imagery (Jordanger 2007).

Community Music Therapy has perhaps most notably described music’s role in the

production of communitas (see above, Section 3.6) through collaborative

improvisation. Within the growing field of music and conflict transformation studies

(Laurence 2008), a key theme has focused on the importance of shared practice and

grass-roots musicking as a prerequisite for enduring forms of change (Bergh 2010;

2011; Robertson 2010). In particular, as Bergh has described, if music is to contribute

to enduringly altered practice, or altered consciousness of the other, that endurance

requires continued and repeated practice – continued and repeated participation in

musical activity. And as we have already indicated, music is by no means an

unmitigated ‘good’ within the conflict transformation literature: as Bergh has

 ͷͺ
observed (Bergh 2011), music can be – and has been – used to inculcate feelings of

animosity, or for purposes of oppression and torture (Cusick 2008); and historically

has been incorporated into military culture through drill, marching and, more recently,

through psych-op motivational techniques (Gittoes 2004; Pieslack 2009). Indeed

Laurence (2008: 33), even while writing of music’s potential in conflict resolution,

argues that inculcating peaceful values is one of music’s rarest uses, and that “of

music’s purposes, many and probably most, serve the on-going ends of power

relationships one way or another.”

5.3 Implications and cautions

In the same way that a significant degree of caution must accompany claims for

music’s therapeutic potential, so too the currently very limited extent of any direct

evidence for empathic and culturally mediating effects of listening to music must be

recognized. We have no evidence, so far, for the robustness or duration of the effects

that we have observed in our own empirical study: it may be that any kind of

attitudinal change is a very temporary shift that is easily disrupted, casting doubt on

the practical efficacy of music as an agent of change in cultural understanding (though

the study by Neto et al., 2015 encouragingly suggests otherwise). And in the light of

the statistical interaction with dispositional empathy, our result suggests that any

practical efficacy might be confined to those individuals who are already predisposed

to be empathic towards others – arguably those people who are (to put it crudely) the

least urgent cases. Are we then forced to conclude that music has little or no power to

change attitudes among those people who are most resistant? Perhaps more seriously,

music – as we have already indicated – is arguably as capable of distinguishing

between, dividing, and alienating people as it is of bringing them together (cf.

 ͷͻ
Bourdieu 1984/1979). In the context of what is broadly speaking a defence of music’s

social significance, Hesmondhalgh (2013: 85) points out that “music can reinforce

defensive and even aggressive forms of identity that narrow down opportunities for

flourishing in the lives of those individuals who adhere to such forms of

identification”, and provides a vivid anecdotal example of just such a defensive or

aggressive encounter. He describes a Friday night out with friends at a pub in the

North of England, where an Elvis impersonator happens to be performing. Having

initially dreaded the performance, Hesmondhalgh and his friends, along with the

regulars and other serendipitous strangers who are also in the pub, are quickly won

over by what turns out to be a very persuasive performer, and join in with one

another, and the performer, with increasing intensity. The chorus of the final song

“elicits an ecstasy of collective singing, women and men, all at the top of our voices.

There are smiles and laughter, but there’s melancholy too. It seems that bittersweet

lines from the Elvis repertory are invoking thoughts about relationships, past and

present… [We] stagger out of the pub feeling we’ve had a great night, and that the

working week has been obliterated by laughter and bittersweet emotion. Unwittingly,

I brush against a man’s drink as I’m leaving, and he follows me out demanding an

apology for his spilt beer… The power of Elvis’s music, it seems, has brought

strangers and acquaintances together, and with a formidable intensity. But my pursuer

has reminded me unpleasantly that there are those who feel excluded from such

collective pleasures. If music-based gatherings answer to our need for sociality and

attachment, and combat loneliness, might they also evoke envy when others miss

out?” (Hesmondhalgh 2013: 103-4)

Are we to regard music’s affiliative and divisive attributes as two sides of the

same coin, or as a more fundamental incompatibility between emancipatory and

 ͸Ͳ
oppressive qualities? Indeed, rather than considering how music might help to make a

bridge between apparently pre-existent cultural ghettos, should we not be asking in

what ways music is already implicated in the establishment and maintenance of those

very ghettos in the first place? These are significant challenges to the potentially

starry-eyed representation of music that an uncritical attitude might project; but as

Hesmondhalgh, again, puts it: “Music’s ability to enrich people’s lives [and expand

their empathic understanding] is fragile, but I believe it can be defended better if we

understand that fragility, and do not pretend it floats free of the profound problems we

face in our inner lives, and in our attempts to live together” (Hesmondhalgh 2013:

171).

Part of understanding that ‘fragility’ is considering what, if anything, is special

about music as a force for (admittedly complicated, and perhaps compromised)

cultural benefit. Why not football, or food – both of which can lay claim to mass

engagement and global reach? Is there anything about music that affords either

particular, or particularly powerful or efficacious kinds of inter-cultural empathy and

engagement? One way to tackle these questions is to consider what the mechanisms

for empathy and cultural understanding might be, and in what ways those mechanisms

are engaged by different cultural manifestations – whether those are music, food or

football. As our critical review of the literature reveals, this is a fascinating but

considerable challenge, which turns in part on how broad or narrow a conception of

empathy is entertained. One approach might be to admit a considerable range of

broadly intersubjective engagements as occupying different positions on an empathy

spectrum, from conditions of self-other identity in the context of what Rabinowitch et

al. call merged subjectivity (perhaps emblematically represented by the primal

oneness between mother and infant); through the powerfully allocentric disposition of

 ͸ͳ
Baron-Cohen’s (2011) hyper-empathic individuals, and the more general and

widespread distribution of compassionate fellow-feeling; to the operation of more

controlled and deliberate rational and imaginative projection into the circumstances of

others. Some (such as Coplan, Laurence and Trevarthen – and Adam Smith in rather

different terms) might want to make – and have argued for – firm distinctions

between, say, empathy and sympathy. But an alternative might be to agree on an

umbrella term (and empathy might be as good as any), and then focus on what

distinguishes different positions under the umbrella, and what the implications

(practical, functional, conceptual) of those differences might be.

A common thread that runs through most of these positions is the central role

of embodiment in empathy. From the most neuroscientifically reductionist approach

(e.g. a ‘fundamentalist’ mirror neuron perspective) to the position of Smith or

Stokes, a capacity to feel the situation of another underpins the inter-subjective

character of empathy/fellow-feeling/sympathy. And arguably it is in this respect that

music has ‘special properties’ – properties of enactment, of synchronization and

entrainment in situations ranging from a single individual alone with their music (the

solitary headphone listener ‘lost in music’ – cf. Clarke 2014) to massively social

contexts (pop festivals, simulcasts) where enormous numbers of people can

participate in collective, synchronized, embodied engagement. As others have pointed

out (e.g. Cross 2012), music is a uniquely widespread, emotionally and physically

engaging, social, participatory and fluidly communicative cultural achievement – a

powerful cultural niche that affords extraordinary possibilities for participants,10 and

which both complements and in certain respects surpasses those other global cultural

achievements in which human beings participate (language, religion, visual culture,

craft). There is little, perhaps, to be gained by attempting to set any one of these up on

 ͸ʹ
a uniquely high pedestal – but equally it is important not to flatten the terrain by

failing to recognize music’s particular combination of affordances in this rich cultural

mix: cognitive and emotional complexity, solitary to mass-social engagement,

compelling embodiment, floating intentionality (Cross 2012),

synchronization/entrainment, flexible mimicry, temporal and ambient character, and

digital-analog (or categorical-continuous) mix.11

As this review has demonstrated, the empathy-affording character of these

affordances has been explored and theorized across a very wide range of disciplines –

invoking mechanisms that range from mirror neurons to semiotics and the cultural

history of sentimentalism. Are these kinds of explanation in any way compatible with

one another? And is there a way to avoid a simplistic and potentially reductionist

‘layers of an onion’ approach in which supposedly ‘fundamental’ biological attributes

(whether those are genetic – in the case of a narrowly ‘trait’ perspective on empathy –

or neurological) underpin progressively more ramified and arbitrary cultural

constructs? We have already seen (Heyes 2010) that from within the scientific

literature itself (quite apart from outside it) there is plenty of evidence for the

plasticity of so-called fundamental properties, and for the reciprocal relationship

between biology and culture. Mirror neurons may be as much a consequence of a

culture of intersubjective engagement as they are foundation for it. But it clearly

remains a considerable challenge to develop in detail the more flexible and relational

approach that we point towards here.

Finally, there is the question of the utility of the concept or term empathy

itself. Perhaps rather like the word ‘meaning’, it both enables and suffers from the

capacity to bring together a wide range of phenomena, which critics may find

unhelpfully heterogeneous. We share the concern not to confuse chalk with cheese,

 ͸͵
but against a drive to compartmentalize we are persuaded of the value of sticking with

a word and its associated conceptual field which, although still just a century old,

offers a rich and powerful way to try to understand a central building block of human

sociality. The debates about whether to understand empathy as a genetic

predisposition, a personality trait, an emergent attribute of perception-action coupling,

a skill, or a social achievement are symptomatic of the conceptual reach of the term.

Engelen and Röttger-Rössler (2012), in their introduction to a special issue of the

journal Emotion Review devoted to empathy, declare in their first sentence that “there

is no accepted standard definition of empathy—either among the sciences and

humanities or in the specific disciplines” (Engelen & Röttger-Rössler 2012: 3), but

nonetheless endorse the importance of continuing to develop better understandings of

that fundamentally social capacity “to feel one’s way into others, to take part in the

other’s affective situation, and adopt the other’s perspective… to grasp the other’s

intentions and thus to engage in meaningful social interaction.” (Engelen & Röttger-

Rössler 2012: 5) We, too, are committed to the value of that enterprise, and to the

specific role that music may play in understanding empathy, and as a ‘medium’ for

empathy. In addressing the complex network of relationships between neighbouring

terms (sympathy, compassion, contagion, entrainment, ‘theory of mind’,

attunement…) we see the prospect of a more nuanced and differentiated

understanding of what Baron-Cohen (2011: 107) has characterized as “an important

global issue related to the health of our communities” and “the most valuable resource

in our world”.

Acknowledgements

 ͸Ͷ
This work was supported by an award from the Arts and Humanities Research

Council to the first author, under the Cultural Value initiative, award no.

AH/L014327/1

 ͸ͷ
References

Aasgaard, T. (2002) Song Creations with Children Who Have Cancer: Process and

Meaning. PhD Thesis, Aalborg University, retrieved on 24 August 2014 from:

[Link]

Acord, S., & DeNora, T. (2012) Culture and the arts: From art worlds to arts-in-

action. The Annals of the American Academy of Behavioral and Social Science, 619:

223-37.

Alluri, V., Toiviainen, P., Jääskeläinen, I. P., Glerean, E., Sams, M., & Brattico, E.

(2012) Large-scale brain networks emerge from dynamic processing of musical

timbre, key and rhythm. Neuroimage, 59 (4): 3677-3689.

Ansdell, G. (1995) Music For Life: Aspects of Creative Music Therapy with Adult

Clients. London: Jessica Kingsley Publications.

Ansdell, G. (2014) How Music Helps. Farnham: Ashgate.

Ansdell, G., Davidson, J. W., & Magee, W. (2010) From “this f***ing life” to “that’s

better” … in four minutes: an interdisciplinary study of music therapy’s “present

moments” and their potential for affect modulation. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy

19 (1): 3–28.

Archie, P., Bruera, E., & Cohen, L. (2013). Music-based interventions in palliative

 ͸͸
cancer care: a review of quantitative studies and neurobiological literature. Supportive

Care in Cancer, 21 (9), 2609–2624. doi:10.1007/s00520-013-1841-4

Avenanti, A., Minio-Paluello, I., Bufalari, I., & Aglioti, S. M. (2009) The pain of a

model in the personality of an onlooker: influence of state-reactivity and personality

traits on embodied empathy for pain. Neuroimage, 44 (1): 275-283.

Aziz-Zadeh, L., Sheng, T., & Gheytanchi, A. (2010) Common premotor regions for

the perception and production of prosody and correlations with empathy and prosodic

ability. PLoS One, 5 (1): 1-8.

Balkwill, L-L., Thompson, W. F., & Matsunaga, R. (2004) Recognition of emotion in

Japanese, Western, and Hindustani music by Japanese listeners. Japanese

Psychological Research, 46 (4): 337–349.

Bangert, M., Peschel, T., Schlaug, G., Rotte, M., Drescher, D., Hinrichs, H., Heinze,

H-J. & Altenmüller, E. (2006) Shared networks for auditory and motor processing in

professional pianists: evidence from fMRI conjunction. Neuroimage, 30 (3): 917-926.

Baron-Cohen, S. (2011) Zero Degrees of Empathy. A New Theory of Human Cruelty

and Kindness. London: Allen Lane.

Baron-Cohen, S., & Wheelwright, S. (2004). The Empathy Quotient: An investigation

of adults with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism, and normal sex

differences. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34 (2): 163–175.

 ͸͹
Batt-Rawden, K.B. & DeNora, T. & Ruud, E.: (2005) Music listening and

empowerment in health promotion: a study of the role and significance of music

in everyday life of the long-term ill. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy 1 (2):120-136.

Becker, H. S. (1953) Becoming a Marihuana user. American Journal of Sociology, 59

(3): 235-42.

Becker, H. S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of

California Press.

Becker, J. (2004) Deep Listeners. Music, Emotion and Trancing. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press.

Bergh, A. (2010) I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing: Music and Conflict

Transformation. PhD thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Exeter.

Retrieved on August 24, 2014 from:

[Link]

ce=2

Bergh, A. (2011) Emotions in motion: transforming conflict and music. In I. Deliège

& J. Davidson (Eds.), Music and the Mind: Essays in Honour of John Sloboda.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 363-378.

 ͸ͺ
Berlant, L. (2008) The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality

in American Culture. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press

Bell, M. (2000) Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling. Basingstoke:

Palgrave

Bolger, D., Trost, W., & Schon, D. (2013). Rhythm implicitly affects temporal

orienting of attention across modalities. Acta Psychologica, 142 (2): 238-244. doi:

10.1016/[Link].2012.11.012

Bonde, L. O. (2011) Health musicing – music therapy or music and health: A model,

empirical examples and personal reflections. Music & Arts in Action, 3 (2): 120-140.

Born, G. (2010) The social and the aesthetic. Cultural Sociology 4 (2): 171-208.

Born, G. (2012) Music and the social. In M. Clayton, T. Herbert, & R. Middleton

(Eds.), The Cultural Study of Music. A Critical Introduction. Second edition. New

York: Routledge, pp. 261-274.

Botvinick, M., & Cohen, J. (1998) Rubber hands “feel” touch that eyes see. Nature,

391 (6669): 756.

Bourdieu, P. (1984/1979) Distinction. Translated by R. Nice. London: Routledge.

Originally published as La distinction: critique sociale du jugement Paris: Éditions de

Minuit.

 ͸ͻ
Bregman, A. S. (1990) Auditory Scene [Link] Perceptual Organization of

Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Butt, J. (2010) Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity. Perspectives on the Passions.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Butterworth, J. (2014) Andean Divas: Emotion, Ethics and Intimate Spectacle in

Peruvian Huayno Music. Unpublished PhD thesis, Royal Holloway University of

London.

Chanda, M. L., & Levitin, D. J. (2013) The neurochemistry of music. Trends in

Cognitive Sciences, 17(4), 179-193. doi:10.1016/[Link].2013.02.007

Chartrand, T. L & Bargh, J. A. (1999) The chameleon effect: the perception-

behaviour link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

76 (6): 893-910.

Chartrand, T. L., & Dalton, A. N. (2008) Mimicry: Its ubiquity, importance, and

functionality. In E. Morsella, J. A. Nargh & P. Gollwitzer (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of

Human Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 458-483.

Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. (1998) The extended mind. Analysis, 58 (1): 7-19.

Clarke, D. & Clarke, E. F. (Eds.) (2011) Music and Consciousness: Philosophical,

Psychological and Cultural Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 ͹Ͳ
Clarke, E. F. (2001) Meaning and the specification of motion in music. Musicae

Scientiae, 5 (2), 213-234.

Clarke, E. F. (2005) Ways of Listening. An Ecological Approach to the Perception of

Musical Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.

Clarke, E. F. (2014) Lost and found in music: music, consciousness and subjectivity.

Musicae Scientiae, 18 (3): 354-368.

Clarke, E.F., Dibben, N., & Pitts, S. E. (2010) Music and Mind in Everyday Life.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Clayton, M., Sager, R. & Will, U. (2005) In time with the music: the concept of

entrainment and its significance for ethnomusicology. European Meetings in

Ethnomusicology 11: 1-82

Cohen, E., Ejsmond-Frey, R. Knight, N. & Dunbar, R. (2010) Rowers’ high: Elevated

endorphin release under conditions of active behavioural synchrony. Biology Letters,

6(1), 106-108.

Cohen, E., Mundry, R. & Kirschner, S. (2014) Religion, synchrony, and cooperation.

Religion, Brain & Behavior 4(1), 20-30.

Colombetti, G. (2013) The Feeling Body. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

 ͹ͳ
Cook, N. (1998) Music. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cook, N. (2012) Anatomy of the encounter: Intercultural analysis as relational

musicology. In S. Hawkins (Ed.), Critical Musicological Reflections. Essays in

Honour of Derek B. Scott. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 193-208.

Coplan, A. (2011) Understanding empathy: its features and effects. In A. Coplan & P.

Goldie (Eds.), Empathy. Philosophical and Psychological Persepctives. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, pp. 3-18.

Cox, A. (2011) Embodying music: principles of the mimetic hypothesis Music Theory

Online, 17(2)

Cross, I. (2012) Music and biocultural evolution. In M. Clayton, T. Herbert, & R.

Middleton (Eds.), The Cultural Study of Music. A Critical Introduction. Second

edition. New York: Routledge, pp. 17-27.

Cross, I., & Morley, I. (2008). The evolution of music: theories, definitions and the

nature of the evidence. In S. Malloch & C. Trevarthen (Eds.), Communicative

Musicality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 61-82.

Cumming, N. (1997) The subjectivities of 'Erbarme Dich'. Music Analysis, 16 (1): 5-

44.

 ͹ʹ
Cumming, N. (2000) The Sonic Self. Musical Subjectivity and Signification.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Cunningham, W. A., Preacher, K. J., & Banaji, M. R. (2001) Implicit attitude

measures: Consistency, stability, and convergent validity. Psychological Science, 12

(2): 163–170.

Cusick, S. G. (2008) Musicology, torture, repair. Radical Musicology, 3 (1): 1-9.

D’Aloia, A. (2012) Cinematic empathy: spectator involvement in the film experience.

In D. Reynolds & M. Reason (Eds.), Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural

Practices. Bristol: Intellect, pp. 93-107.

Damasio, A. R. (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the

Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Davies, S. (2011) Infectious music: Music-listener emotional contagion. In A. Coplan

& P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy. Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, pp. 134-148.

Davis, M. H. (1980) A multidimensional approach to individual differences in

empathy. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 10: 85.

de la Fuente, E. (2007) The new sociology of art: putting art back into social science

approaches to the arts Cultural Sociology 1 (3): 409-425.

 ͹͵
de la Fuente, E. (2010a). The artwork made me do it: Introduction to the new

sociology of art. Thesis Eleven, 103 (1): 3-9.

de la Fuente, E. (2010b) In defense of theoretical and methodological pluralism in the

sociology of art: A critique of Georgina Born’s programmatic essay. Cultural

Sociology, 4 (2): 47–62.

Demos, A.P., Chaffin, R., Begosh, K.T., Daniels, J.R., and Marsh, K.L. (2012)

Rocking to the beat: effects of music and partner’s movements on spontaneous

interpersonal coordination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141 (1):

49–53.

DeNora, T. (1997) Music and erotic agency - sonic resources and social-sexual action

Body & Society 3(2): 43-65

DeNora, T. (2000) Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DeNora, T. (2003) After Adorno: Rethinking music sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

DeNora, T. (2012). Resounding the great divide: Music in everyday life at the end of

life. Mortality, 17 (2): 92-105.

 ͹Ͷ
DeNora, T. (2013) Music Asylums. Wellbeing through Music in Everyday Life.

Farnham: Ashgate.

de Waal, F. B. (2007) The ‘Russian doll’ model of empathy and imitation. In S.

Bråten (Ed) On Being Moved. From Mirror Neurons to Empathy.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 49-69.

de Wied, M., Zillmann, D. & Ordman, V. (1994) The role of empathic distress in the

enjoyment of cinematic tragedy. Poetics, 23: 91-106.

Dibben, N. (2001) What do we hear, when we hear music?: Music perception and

musical material. Musicae Scientiae, 5 (2): 161-194.

Dick, F. , Lee, H. L., Nusbaum, C., & Price, C. J. (2011) Auditory-motor expertise

alters “speech selectivity” in professional musicians and actors. Cerebral Cortex, 21

(4): 938-948.

Di Pellegrino G., Fadiga L., Fogassi L., Gallese V., & Rizzolatti G. (1992)

Understanding motor events: a neurophysiologival study. Experimental Brain

Research, 91 (1): 176-180.

Domes, G., Heinrichs, M., Michel, A., Berger, C., & Herpertz, S.C. (2007) Oxytocin

improves ‘mind-reading’ in humans. Biological Psychiatry, 61 (6): 731–733.

 ͹ͷ
Drahota, A., Ward, D., Mackenzie, H., Stores, R., Higgins, B., Gal, D., & Dean, T. P.

(2012) Sensory environment on health-related outcomes of hospital patients. The

Cochrane Library, Issue 3, accessed 25 August at:

[Link]

Edwards, J. (1995) ‘You are singing beautifully’: Music therapy and the debridement

bath. The Arts in Psychotherapy 22 (11): 53-5.

Engelen, E-M. & Röttger-Rössler, B. (2012) Current disciplinary and interdisciplinary

debates on empathy. Emotion Review, 4 (1): 3-8

Eyerman, R., & Jamieson, A. (1998) Music and Social Movements. Mobilizing

Traditions in the Twentieth Century Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fancourt, D., Ockelford, A. & Belai, A. (2013) The psychoneuroimmunological

effects of music. A systematic review and a new model. Brain, Behaviour and

Immunity, 36: 15-26.

Fine, G. A. (2010) The sociology of the local: action and its publics. Sociological

Theory, 28 (4): 356-76.

Freedberg, D., & Gallese, V. (2007). Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic

experience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (5): 197-203.

 ͹͸
Gabrielsson, A. (2011) Strong Experiences with Music. Translated by R. Bradbury.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gallese, V. (2001) The “shared manifold” hypothesis: from mirror neurons to

empathy. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (5–7): 33–50.

Gallese, V. (2003) The roots of empathy: the shared manifold hypothesis and the

neural basis of intersubjectivity. Psychopathology, 36 (4): 171–180.

Garrido, S. & Schubert, E. (2011). Individual differences in the enjoyment of negative

emotion in music: A literature review and experiment. Music Perception, 28 (3): 279-

296.

Gazzola, V., Aziz-Zadeh, L., & Keysers, C. (2006) Empathy and the somatotopic

auditory mirror system in humans. Current Biology, 16 (18): 1824-1829.

Gell, Alfred. (1998). Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Gibson, E. J. (1969) Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development. New York:

Appleton–Century–Crofts.

Gibson, E. J., & Pick, A. D. (2000) An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning

and Development. New York: Oxford University Press.

 ͹͹
Gittoes, G. (2006). Soundtrack to War. DVD. Beverly Hills, CA: Melee

Entertainment LLC.

Goldie, P. (2011) Anti-empathy. In A. Coplan, & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy.

Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.

302–317.

Goldman, A. I. (2011) Two routes to empathy: Insights from cognitive neuroscience.

In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy. Philosophical and Psychological

Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 31-44.

Gomart, E. & Hennion, A. (1999) A sociology of attachment: Music amateurs, drug

users. In J. Hassard & J. Law (Eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Sociological

Review Monograph. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 220-247.

Grape, C., Sandgren, M., Hansson, L.-O., Ericson, M., & Theorell, T. (2002) Does

singing promote well-being?: An empirical study of professional and amateur singers

during a singing lesson. Integrative Physiological & Behavioral Science, 38 (1): 65–

74.

Greenberg, D. M., Baron-Cohen, S., Stillwell, D. J., Kosinski, M., & Rentfrow, P. J.

(2015) Musical preferences are linked to cognitive styles. PLoS One, 10 (7):

e0131151.

 ͹ͺ
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. (1998) Measuring individual

differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, 74 (6): 1464-1480.

Greitemeyer, T. (2009) Effects of songs with prosocial lyrics on prosocial thoughts,

affect, and behaviour. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (1): 186-90.

Greitemeyer, T. (2011) Effects of prosocial media on social behavior: When and why

does media exposure affect helping and aggression? Current Directions in

Psychological Science, 20 (4): 251-55

Guéguen, N., Jacob, C., & Lamy, L. (2010) ‘Love is in the air’: Effects of songs with

romantic lyrics on compliance with a courtship request. Psychology of Music, 38 (3):

303-307.

Hanser, S .(2010) Music, health, and well-being. In P. Juslin & J. Sloboda (Eds.),

Oxford Handbook of Music and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 849-

77.

Hari, R. (2007) Human mirroring systems: on assessing mind reading by brain and

body during social interaction. In S. Bråten (Ed.) On Being Moved. From Mirror

Neurons to Empathy. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company,

pp. 89-99.

 ͹ͻ
Haueisen, J., & Knösche, T. (2001) Involuntary motor activity in pianists evoked by

music perception. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 13 (6): 786-792.

Heft, H. (2001) Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and

the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates.

Heinrichs, M., von Dawans, B., & Domes, G. (2009) Oxytocin, vasopressin, and

human social behavior. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 30 (4): 548-557.

Hennion, A. (2007) These things that hold us together. Cultural Sociology 1 (1): 97–

114.

Herbert, R. (2011) Everyday Music Listening. Absorption, Dissociation and

Trancing. Farnham: Ashgate.

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013) Why Music Matters. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Hess, U., & Fischer, A. (2013) Emotional mimicry as social regulation. Personality

and Social Psychology Review, 17 (2): 142-157.

Heyes, C. (2010) Where do mirror neurons come from? Neuroscience &

Biobehavioral Reviews, 34 (4): 575-583.

Heyes, C. (2011) Automatic imitation. Psychological Bulletin, 137 (3): 463–483.

 ͺͲ
Hove, M. J., & Risen, J. L. (2009) It's all in the timing: Interpersonal synchrony

increases affiliation. Social Cognition, 27 (6): 949-960.

Howlett, T. A., Tomlin, S., Ngahfoong, L., Rees, L. H., Bullen, B. A., Skrinar, G. S.

& MacArthur, J. W. (1984) Release of ȕ-endorphin and met-enkephalin during

exercise in normal women in response to training. British Medical Journal, 288,

1950–1952.

Hurlemann, R., Patin, A., Onur, O. A., Cohen, M. X., Baumgartner, T., Metzler, S., ...

& Kendrick, K. M. (2010). Oxytocin enhances amygdala-dependent, socially

reinforced learning and emotional empathy in humans. The Journal of

Neuroscience, 30 (14): 4999-5007.

Huron, D. (2011) Why is sad music pleasurable? A possible role for prolactin.

Musicae Scientiae, 15 (2): 146-158.

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hutchins, E. (2010) Cognitive ecology. Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (4) 705–715.

doi: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01089.x

Iacoboni, M. (2011) Within each other: Neural mechanisms for empathy in the

primate brain. In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy. Philosophical and

Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 45-57.

 ͺͳ
Inzlicht, M., Gutsell, J. N., & Legault, L. (2012) Mimicry reduces racial

prejudice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (1): 361-365.

Jackendoff, R., & Lerdahl, F. (2006) The capacity for music: What is it, and what’s

special about it? Cognition, 100 (1): 33-72.

Jackson, S. & Scott, S. (2007) Faking like a woman? Towards an interpretive

theorization of sexual pleasure Body & Society 13(2): 95-116

Jones, M. R. and Boltz, M. (1989) Dynamic attending and responses to time.

Psychological Review, 96 (3), 459-491.

Jordanger, V. (2007) Healing cultural violence: "Collective vulnerability" through

guided imagery with music. In O. Urbain & P. Van den Dungen (Eds.), Music and

Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics. London: I.B.

Tauris, pp. 128-146.

Juslin, P. N. (2013) From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: towards a unified

theory of musical emotions. Physics of Life Reviews, 10 (3): 235-266.

Juslin, P. N., & Laukka, P. (2003) Communication of emotions in vocal expression

and music performance: Different channels, same code? Psychological Bulletin, 129

(5): 770-814.

 ͺʹ
Juslin, P. N. & Västfjäll, D. (2008) Emotional responses to music: The need to

consider underlying mechanisms. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31: 559–575.

Kaplan, J. T., & Iacoboni, M. (2006) Getting a grip on other minds: Mirror neurons,

intention understanding, and cognitive empathy. Social Neuroscience, 1 (3-4): 175-

183.

Kirschner, S., & Tomasello, M. (2009) Joint drumming: Social context facilitates

synchronization in preschool children. Journal of Experimental Child

Psychology, 102 (3): 299-314.

Kirschner, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010) Joint music making promotes prosocial

behavior in 4-year-old children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31 (5): 354–364.

Koelsch, S. (2012) Brain and Music. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell

Koelsch, S., Fritz, T., Müller, K., & Friederici, A. D. (2006) Investigating emotion

with music: an fMRI study. Human Brain Mapping, 27 (3): 239-250.

Koen, B., Lloyd, J., Barz, G., & Brummel-Smith, K. (2008) The Oxford Handbook of

Medical Ethnomusicology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kohler, E., Keysers, C., Umilta, M. A., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G.

(2002) Hearing sounds, understanding actions: action representation in mirror

neurons. Science, 297 (5582): 846-848.

 ͺ͵
Kramer, L. (1995) Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley:

Universtity of California Press.

Kramer, L. (2001) The mysteries of animation: history, analysis and musical

subjectivity. Music Analysis, 20 (2): 153-178.

Kramer, L. (2003). Franz Schubert. Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Kreutz, G. (2014) Does Singing facilitate social bonding? Music and Medicine, 6 (2):

51-60.

Krznaric, R. (2014) Empathy: Why it Matters, and how to Get it. London: Penguin

Books.

Krueger, J (2014a) Musical manipulations and the emotionally extended mind.

Empirical Musicology Review, 9 (3-4): 208-212.

Krueger, J. (2014b) Affordances and the musically extended mind. Frontiers in

Psychology, 4 (1003): 1-13

Krueger, J. (in press) The affective 'we': Self-regulation and shared emotions. In T.

Szanto & D. Moran (Eds.), The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the 'We',

London, New York: Routledge.

 ͺͶ
Labbé, C., & Grandjean, D. (2014) Musical emotions predicted by feelings of

entrainment. Music Perception, 32 (2): 170-185.

Laurence, F. (2008) Music and empathy. In O. Urbain & P. Van den Dungen (Eds.)

Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics.

London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 13-25.

Lavy, M. M. (2001) Emotion and the experience of listening to music. A framework

for empirical research. Unpublished PhD. thesis, Faculty of Music, University of

Cambridge.

Lee, C. J., Andrade, E. B., & Palmer, S. E. (2013) Interpersonal relationships and

preferences for mood-congruency in aesthetic experiences. Journal of Consumer

Research, doi: 10.1086/670609

Levinson, J. (2006) Musical expressiveness as hearability-as-expression. In Kieran,

M. (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Oxford:

Blackwell Publishing, pp. 192-206.

Levitin, D. (2006) This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

New York: Dutton Penguin.

 ͺͷ
Lipps, T. (1903/1931) Empathy, inward imitation, and sense feelings. In E. F. Carritt

(Ed) Philosophies of Beauty: From Socrates to Robert Bridges being the Sources of

Aesthetic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 252-6

Livingstone, R. S., & Thompson, W. F. (2009) The emergence of music from the

Theory of Mind. Musicae Scientiae, 13 (2 suppl): 83-115.

London, J. (2012) Hearing in Time: Psychological Apects of Musical Meter. Second

Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lundqvist, L. O., Carlsson, F., Hilmersson, P., & Juslin, P. N. (2009) Emotional

responses to music: Experience, expression, and physiology. Psychology of Music, 37

(1): 61-90.

MacDonald, R. A. R. (2013). Music, health, and well-being: A review. International

Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 8, 10.3402/qhw.v8i0.20635.

doi:10.3402/qhw.v8i0.20635

MacDonald, R., Kreutz, G. & Mitchell, L. (Eds.) (2012) Music, Health and

Wellbeing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McClary, S. (2004) Modal Subjectivities. Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

 ͺ͸
McGuiness, A., & Overy, K. (2011) Music, consciousness, and the brain: music as

shared experience of an embodied present. In D. Clarke, & E. Clarke, (Eds.), Music

and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, pp. 245-262.

McNeill, W. H. (1995) Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human

History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mischel W. (1968) Personality and Assessment. New York: Wiley

Mischel, W. (2004) Toward an integrative science of the person Annual Review of

Psychology, 55:1–22. doi: 10.1146/[Link].55.042902.130709

Miu, A. C., & Baltes, F. R. (2012) Empathy manipulation impacts music-induced

emotions: A psychophysiological study on opera. PloS One, 7 (1): e30618.

Molnar-Szakacs, I., & Overy, K. (2006) Music and mirror neurons: from motion

to’e’motion. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 1 (3): 235-241.

Molnar-Szakacs, I., Assuied, V. G. & Overy, K. (2012) Shared affective motion

experience (SAME) and creative, interactive music therapy. In D. J. Hargreaves, D. E.

Miell, & R. A. R. MacDonald (Eds) Musical Imaginations. Multidisciplinary

Perspectives on Creativity, Performance and Perception. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, pp. 313-331.

 ͺ͹
Mukamel, R., Ekstrom, A. D., Kaplan, J., Iacoboni, M., & Fried, I. (2010) Single-

neuron responses in humans during execution and observation of actions. Current

Biology, 20 (8): 750–756.

Nagel, T. (1974) What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–

450.

Nelson, E. E., & Panksepp, J. (1998) Brain structures of infant-mother attachment:

contributions of opioids, oxytocin, and norepinephrine. Neuroscience &

Biobehavioral Reviews, 22 (3): 437–452.

Neto, F., da Conceiçao Pinto, M., & Mullet, E. (2015) Can music reduce anti-dark-

skin prejudice? A test of a cross-cultural musical education programme. Psychology

of Music, doi: 10.1177/0305735614568882.

Nilsson, U. (2009) Soothing music can increase oxytocin levels during bed rest after

open-heart surgery: A randomised control trial. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 18 (15):

2153-2161.

Nordoff, P., & Robbins, C. (1977) Creative Music Therapy. New York: John Day.

North, A. C., Hargreaves, D. J., & McKendrick, J. (1999) The influence of in-store

music on wine selections. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84 (2): 271-276.

 ͺͺ
Overy, K., & Molnar-Szakacs, I. (2009) Being together in time: Musical experience

and the mirror neuron system. Music Perception, 36 (5), 489-504.

Peters, D. (2010) Enactment in listening: intermedial dance in EGM sonic scenarios

and the bodily grounding of the listening experience. Performance Research, 15 (3):

81-7.

Penfield, W., & Jasper, H. H. (1954) Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the

Human Brain. London: Churchill.

Perlovsky, L. (2010) Musical emotions: Functions, origins, evolution. Physics of Life

Reviews 7 (1): 2-27.

Pieslack, J. (2009) Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Preston, S. D., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2002) Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate

bases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25 (1): 1-20.

Rabinowitch, T. C., Cross, I., & Burnard, P. (2013) Long-term musical group

interaction has a positive influence on empathy in children. Psychology of Music, 41

(4): 484-498.

 ͺͻ
Rabinowitch, T. C., Cross, I., & Burnard, P. (2012) Musical group interaction,

intersubjectivity and merged subjectivity. In D. Reynolds & M. Reason (Eds.),

Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Bristol: Intellect, 109-120.

Regev, M. (2013) Pop-Rock Music. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Reynolds, D. (2012) Kinesthetic empathy and the dance’s body: from emotion to

affect. In D. Reynolds & M. Reason (Eds.), Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and

Cultural Practices. Bristol: Intellect, 121-136

Robertson, C., (2010) Music and conflict transformation in Bosnia: Constructing and

reconstructing the normal. Music and Arts in Action, 2 (2): 38-55.

Sarbanes, J. (2006) Musicking and communitas: The aesthetic mode of sociality in

rebetika subculture. Popular Music and Society, 29(1) 17-35.

Scherer, K. R., & Zentner, M. R. (2001) Emotional effects of music: Production rules.

In Juslin, P. N., & Sloboda, J. A. (Eds.), Music and Emotion: Theory and Research.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 361-392.

Schütz, A. (1951) Making music together. A study in social relationship. Social

Research, 18 (1): 76-97.

Shamay-Tsoory, S. G. (2011) The neural bases for empathy. The Neuroscientist, 17

(1): 18-24.

 ͻͲ
Sheng, F., Liu, Y., Zhou, B., Zhou, W., & Han, S. (2013) Oxytocin modulates the

racial bias in neural responses to others’ suffering. Biological Psychology, 92 (2):

380-386.

Singer, T., Seymour, B., O'Doherty, J. P., Stephan, K. E., Dolan, R. J., & Frith, C. D.

(2006) Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others.

Nature, 439 (7075): 466-469.

Skånland, M. S. (2012). A technology of well-being. A qualitative study on the use of

MP3 players as a medium for musical self-care. Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert

Academic

Small, C. (1998) Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Smith, A. (1790 [1759]) Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: A. Millar (6th Edition).

Retrived on July 24 2014 from: [Link]

Sonnby-Borgström, M., Jönsson, P., & Svensson, O. (2003) Emotional empathy as

related to mimicry reactions at different levels of information processing. Journal of

Nonverbal Behavior, 27 (1): 3-23.

 ͻͳ
Stein, E. (1989/1917) On the Problem of Empathy, 3rd ed, trad. Waltraut Stein,

Washington: ICS Publications. Originally published as Zum Problem der Einfühlung,

Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses.

Stern, D. (2010) Forms of Vitality. Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology and

the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stige, B. & Aarø, L. E. (2012) Invitation to Community Music Therapy. London:

Routledge.

Stige, B., G. Ansdell, C. Elephant, & M. Pavlicevic (2010) Where Music Helps:

Community Music Therapy in Action and Reflection. Farnham: Ashgate.

Stock, J. P. J. (2014) Implications for ethnomusicology. In D. Fabian, R. Timmers, &

E. Schubert (Eds.), Expressiveness in Musical Performance. Empirical Approaches

across Styles and Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 340-343.

Stokes, M. (2007): Adam Smith and the Dark Nightingale: On twentieth-century

sentimentalism. twentieth-century music, 3 (2): 201–219.

Stokes, M. (2010) The Republic of Love. Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stuart, S. (2012) Enkinaesthesia: the essential sensuous background for co-agency. In

Z. Radman (Ed.), The Background: Knowing Without Thinking: Mind, Action,

 ͻʹ
Cognition and the Phenomenon of the Background. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

pp.167-86.

Stumpf, C. & Trippett, D. (2012) The Origins of Music. Edited and translated by

David Trippett. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published as Die

Anfänge der Musik. Leipzig: Barth, 1911.

Tarr, B. (2015) Dance and Social Bonding: Synchrony and the Endogenous Opioid

System. Unpublished D. Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford.

Tarr, B.. Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2014) Music and social bonding: “Self-

other” merging and neurohormonal mechanisms. Frontiers in Psychology, doi:

10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01096.

Trevarthen, C. (2002) Origins of musical identity: Evidence from infancy for musical

social awareness. In R. A. R. MacDonald, D. J. Hargreaves, & D. E. Miell (Eds.),

Musical Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21-38.

Turner, E. (2012) Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Turner, V. (1997 [1969]) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.

London: Aldine Transaction

 ͻ͵
Valdesolo, P., & DeSteno, D. (2011) Synchrony and the social tuning of

compassion. Emotion, 11 (2): 262-266.

Van den Tol, A. J. M., & Edwards, J. (2013) Exploring a rationale for choosing to

listen to sad music when feeling sad. Psychology of Music, 41 (4): 440–465.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind. Cognitive

Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vischer, R. (1873/1994) Über das Formgefühl (On the Optical Sense of Form: a

Contribution to Aesthetics). In H. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou (eds and trans)

Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 Santa

Monica, CA: Getty Centre for the History of Art and the Humanities, pp. 89-124.

Vuoskoski, J. K., Clarke, E. F., & DeNora, T. (submitted) Music listening evokes

implicit affiliation. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Vuoskoski, J. K., & Eerola, T. (2011) Measuring music-induced emotion A

comparison of emotion models, personality biases, and intensity of experiences.

Musicae Scientiae, 15 (2): 159-173.

Vuoskoski, J. K., & Eerola, T (2012) Can sad music really make you sad? Indirect

measures of affective states induced by music and autobiographical memories.

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6 (3): 204-213.

 ͻͶ
Vuoskoski, J. K., & Eerola, T. (2015) Extramusical information contributes to

emotions induced by music. Psychology of Music, 43 (2): 262-274.

doi:10.1177/0305735613502373

Vuoskoski, J. K., Thompson, W. F., McIlwain, D., & Eerola, T. (2012) Who enjoys

listening to sad music and why? Music Perception, 29 (3): 311-317.

Wade, B. (2014) Composing Japanese Musical Modernity. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Watt, R. J., & Ash, R. L. (1998) A psychological investigation of meaning in

music. Musicae Scientiae, 2 (1): 33-53.

Witvliet, C., & Vrana, S. (1996) The emotional impact of instrumental music on

affect ratings, facial EMG, autonomic measures and the startle reflex: effects of

valence and arousal. Psychophysiology, 33 Supplement s1: 91.

 ͻͷ
Notes


1
“In 1999, Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said founded the West-Eastern Divan as a

workshop for Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab musicians. Meeting in Weimar,

Germany – a place where the humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment are

overshadowed by the Holocaust – they materialized a hope to replace ignorance with

education, knowledge and understanding; to humanize the other; to imagine a better

future. Within the workshop, individuals who had only interacted with each other

through the prism of war found themselves living and working together as equals. As

they listened to each other during rehearsals and discussions, they traversed deep

political and ideological divides. Though this experiment in coexistence was intended

as a one-time event, it quickly evolved into a legendary orchestra.” From

[Link] accessed 20 August 2014.

2
[Link] accessed 4 August 2015
3
[Link] accessed 4 August 2015
4
Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright have developed their own psychometric tool – the

so-called Empathy Quotient (EQ; Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, 2004).

5
The title of Baron-Cohen’s book is Zero Degrees of Empathy, and he takes

psychopaths and autists as negative and positive manifestations of the ‘zero degree’

condition, while he cites an exceptionally sensitive counselor as an example of the

‘six degrees’ condition.

6
The discovery was first made in relation to visual observation (monkeys watching

another individual reach for an object) subsequent research has also revealed the

operation of auditory mirror neurons (e.g. Kohler et al. 2002) – a matter of obvious

significance for music.

 ͻ͸

7
Since music has no facial muscles! Arguably, however, though at a stretch, musical

sounds may specify ‘musicking bodies’ sufficiently to admit a mirroring explanation.

8
This, and the corresponding ‘dark-skinned’, is the authors’ terminology.
9
It is a deliberate feature of the model that it embraces two cultural contexts ((3) and

(13)): one (3) represents the cultural context of the listening experience ‘here and

now’, while the other (13) represents the cultural context to which the music belongs.

Thought of in the particular circumstances of our listening study described above,

these two are clearly somewhat distinct: (3) is the specific context of sitting at a

computer with headphones on in the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford in

2015; while (13) is the cultural context to which the piece of music (either Indian or

West-African) belongs. In other circumstances, these two may overlap very

substantially, or even completely – such as when a person listens to music of their

own current culture in an everyday, culturally normative context.

10
Participation in music ranges from the obviously enactive (improvising, composing,

performing) through various modes of more or less active listening, dancing, and

singing along; to a whole variety of digitally/web-mediated engagements with music

such as down/up-loading, and the limitless discourse about music. Small’s (1998)

term ‘musicking’ is an attempt to embrace all this.

11
What we have in mind with this last is the entanglement of discrete categories

(pitches, rhythmic units, formal structures) with continuously variable attributes

(intonation, expressive timing, improvised ramifications/extemporizations); and of

presentational attributes (sound, movement, palpable presence) with representational

systems (notations, modes of recording, discourses).

 ͻ͹