Meaning-making and creativity in musical entrainment

Abstract

In this paper we suggest that basic forms of musical entrainment may be considered as intrinsically creative, enabling further creative behaviors which may flourish at different levels and timescales. Rooted in an agent's capacity to form meaningful couplings with their sonic, social, and cultural environment, musical entrainment favors processes of adaptation and exploration, where innovative and functional aspects are cultivated via active, bodily experience. We explore these insights through a theoretical lens that integrates findings from enactive cognitive science and creative cognition research. We center our examination on the realms of groove experience and the communicative and emotional dimensions of music, aiming to present a novel preliminary perspective on musical entrainment, rooted in the fundamental concepts of meaning-making and creativity. To do so, we draw from a suite of approaches that place particular emphasis on the role of situated experience and review a range of recent empirical work on entrainment (in musical and non-musical settings), emphasizing the latter's biological and cognitive foundations. We conclude that musical entrainment may be regarded as a building block for different musical creativities that shape one's musical development, offering a concrete example for how this theory could be empirically tested in the future.

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

“…It emphasizes an approach that aligns with those motor theories of perception that focus on the dynamic tension between “sensorimotor processing” and “ideomotor simulation.” The former aims at linking the incoming sensory input to the central nervous system and the effector organs in a continuous and ongoing way, with the aim to minimize possible deviations and keep disturbances within critical limits—hence the term conservative behavior ; the latter takes more distance to the sensory input and allows the perceiver to simulate the actual unfolding of the stimuli at a virtual level of imagery ( Paillard, 1990 , 1994 ; Berthoz, 1996 , 1997 ; Reybrouck, 2020b ). Both approaches may complement each other in the sense that music processing affects not only the executive and the sensory systems; it may also activate mechanisms of mental simulations, entrainment, creativity, and social connectedness even in solitary practices (see Schiavio et al, 2015 , 2022a , b , c , 2024 ). 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.…”