A Dynamic Interactive Approach to Music Listening: The Role of Entrainment, Attunement and Resonance

Abstract

This paper takes a dynamic interactive stance to music listening. It revolves around the focal concept of entrainment as an operational tool for the description of fine-grained dynamics between the music as an entraining stimulus and the listener as an entrained subject. Listeners, in this view, can be “entrained” by the sounds at several levels of processing, dependent on the degree of attunement and alignment of their attention. The concept of entrainment, however, is somewhat ill-defined, with distinct conceptual labels, such as external vs. mutual, symmetrical vs. asymmetrical, metrical vs. non-metrical, within-persons and between-person, and physical vs. cognitive entrainment. The boundaries between entrainment, resonance, and synchronization are also not always very clear. There is, as such, a need for a broadened approach to entrainment, taking as a starting point the concept of oscillators that interact with each other in a continuous and ongoing way, and relying on the theoretical framework of interaction dynamics and the concept of adaptation. Entrainment, in this broadened view, is seen as an adaptive process that accommodates to the music under the influence of both the attentional direction of the listener and the configurations of the sounding stimuli.

Music Listening as Kangaroo Mother Care: From Skin-to-Skin Contact to Being Touched by the Music

“…The major aim of this paper, however, was to reflect on the KMC-to-music translation, with a focus on the dyadic interaction between the music and the listener, which can be investigated in a dynamic-interactive way (see [78] for an overview). There are two major perspectives in this regard: the mother-to-child or child-to-mother interaction.…”

“…As to the former, much is to be expected from research on "entrainment" (see below), which, in its broadest definition, is a process whereby two (rhythmic) processes interact with each other to mutually adjust or lock into a common phase and/or periodicity (see [77,78] on the basis of acoustic, visual, and haptic cues as evidenced, e.g., in synchronized group dancing [79]. The haptic cues, in particular, are linked to kinds of entrainment in which there is a physical coupling between the performers through direct bodily contact or indirectly via some kind of mediation.…”

“…The vibrational responses, however, are not always harmful or annoying. Recent research has even broadened the scope of research by also exploring the role of adaptation to vibrational energy, with a central focus on the concepts of physiological entrainment and resonance [78]. The phenomenon of entrainment, in particular, has received a lot of interest in current research [77,[252][253][254].…”

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

“…Taken together, however, they provide a richer and more holistic model of music processing that encompasses the whole body and its interactions with its environment. The notion of interaction is quite important here (see Reybrouck, 2023a for a broad overview). It should be seen as a dynamic approach to musical engagement that goes beyond a linear and unidirectional input–output model of information processing.…”

“…Cutting across the boundaries of well-defined areas of research such as motor learning, skill acquisition, cognition, and expressive behavior, music performance can be conceived of as a distinct field of study—one which arguably finds its place within the broader realms of perception and action studies—with a special focus on expert behavior ( Lehmann and Davidson, 2002 ; Alexander, 2003 ; Chaffin et al, 2003 ; Ericsson et al, 2007 ; Brown et al, 2015 ), creativity ( Deliège and Wiggins, 2006 ; Loui, 2018 ; Schiavio et al, 2022c ), embodiment ( Leman, 2007 ; Cox, 2016 ; Reybrouck, 2021 ), interaction ( Lesaffre et al, 2017 ; Reybrouck, 2023a ) and dynamic system theory ( Richardson and Chemero, 2014 ; Nijs et al, 2023 ). Due to this interdisciplinary nature, a number of contributions have approached the study of music performance through comparisons with other domains, such as sports (see Schiavio et al, 2019 for an overview) as well as seemingly distant areas including mathematics and chess ( Ericsson et al, 2007 ).…”