Musical and non-musical involvement in daily life: The case of absorption

Abstract

The construct of absorption (effortless engagement) has been the subject of a small number of discipline-specific studies of involvement, including music. This paper reports the results of an empirical project that compared psychological qualities of absorption in everyday music listening scenarios with characteristics of non-music-related involvement. Absorption was located in “real-world” settings, and experiences across different activities in a variety of contexts were tapped as soon as possible after they occurred. The inquiry was designed to test two assumptions that have underpinned previous absorption research: first, that certain activities are inherently particularly absorbing; second, that absorption is best conceptualized primarily as a trait as opposed to a state. Twenty participants kept diaries for two weeks, recording descriptions of involving experiences of any kind. Eight weeks after submitting descriptive reports they completed the Modified Tellegen Absorption Scale ( Jamieson, 2005 ). Diaries indicated that different activities shared a subset of involving features, and confirmed the importance of multi-sensory perception and the imaginative faculty to absorbed experiences. Music may be a particularly effective agent in the facilitation of absorption because it affords multiple potential entry points to involvement (acoustic attributes, source specification, entrainment, emotion, fusion of modalities) and because its semantic malleability makes it adaptable to a variety of circumstances. The MODTAS provided insufficient evidence for establishing correlations between state and trait absorption. It is argued that state and trait divisions are constructs that are inherently problematic.

The Role of Trait and State Absorption in the Enjoyment of Music

“…One exception to this is absorption, which is linked to the personality trait of openness to experience. Herbert [3] found that engagement with music is an important way of inducing absorption, making the study of music and absorption particularly appealing. Thus, in this study we investigated the relationships between music preference and trait versus state absorption.…”

Sculpting a Mobile Musical Soundtrack

“…None expressed feeling self-conscious. This appears to mirror a stream of prior research on everyday mobile music listening [6,19], which emphases its dissociative function in which people immerse themselves in personalised 'soundworlds', experiencing feelings of accompanied isolation, control, selfsufficiency, an even a form of sanctuary [6].…”

“…Similar is Chion's concept of conceptual resonance, a cyclical process in which music affects a viewer's interpretation of an image, which in turn affects their impression of the music [8]. Shifting to mobile music listening, Bull and Herbert present spreading activation to account for how iPod's 'astheticise' their environment and in doing so improve the quality of their experience [6,19].…”

“…This participant was describing the music matching an exhibit as though it was intentional, but they could not understand how this could be achieved. Only four participants presumed that GPS playback functionality was being used (P7, 11,19,20). P11 described testing out this assumption on the boundary between two regions and following their realisation they speculated that it enhanced their appreciation of the soundtrack and the experience further.…”

“…Prior research has revealed how people increasingly curate their own soundtracks to accompany everyday activities such as commuting or exercising by creating personalized playlists to socialize, 'astheticise' and narrate these often mundane, solitary mobile activities [6,19]. Composers have adopted mobility as a driver for creating interactive contemporary media experiences [4].…”