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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 or playing can create a feeling of connection with other listeners or performers, with distinctive levels of immersion and absorption. A major question, in this regard, is whether the music does have an ontological status, as an end in itself, or whether it is only a tool for the mediation of something else. In this paper we endorse a mediating perspective, with a focus on the music’s potential to increase affiliative bonding between listeners, performers and even the music. Music, then, is hypostasized as “something that touches us” and can be considered a partner of affiliative exchange. It has the potential to move us and to modulate the way we experience the space around us. We therefore elaborate on the tactile dimension of being moved, as well as on the distinction between personal, peripersonal, and extrapersonal space, with a corresponding distinction between first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives on musical engagement.

The metaphor of being touched by music is widespread and almost universal. The tactile experience, moreover, has received growing interest in recent years. There is, however, a need to go beyond a mere metaphorical use of the term, by positioning the tactile experience within the broader frame of embodied cognition and the experiential turn in cognitive science. This article explores the possible contribution of a science of touch by defining music as a vibrational phenomenon that affects the body and the senses. It takes as a starting point the clinical findings on the psychological and physiological value of tender touch with a special focus on the method of kangaroo mother care, which is a method for holding the baby against the chest of the mother, skin-to-skin. It is seen as one of the most basic affiliative bondings with stimuli that elicit reward. Via an extensive review of the research literature, it is questioned as to what extent this rationale can be translated to the realm of music. There are, in fact, many analogies, but a comprehensive theoretical framework is still lacking. This article aims at providing at least some preparatory groundwork to fuel more theorizing about listening and its relation to the sense of touch.

This paper provides an attempt to conceive of music in terms of a sounding environment. Starting from a definition of music as a collection of vibrational events, it introduces the distinction between discrete-symbolic representations as against analog-continuous representations of the sounds. The former makes it possible to conceive of music in terms of a Humboldt system, the latter in terms of an experiential approach. Both approaches, further, are not opposed to each other, but are complementary to some extent. There is, however, a distinction to be drawn between the bottom-up approach to auditory processing of environmental sounds and music, which is continuous and proceeding in real time, as against the top-down approach, which is proceeding at a level of mental representation by applying discrete symbolic labels to vibrational events. The distinction is discussed against the background of phylogenetic and ontogenetic claims, with a major focus on the innate auditory capabilities of the fetus and neonate and the gradual evolution from mere sensory perception of sound to sense-making and musical meaning. The latter, finally, is elaborated on the basis of the operational concepts of affordance and functional tone, thus bringing together some older contributions from ecology and biosemiotics.

This article is a hypothesis and theory paper. It elaborates on the possible relation between music as a stimulus and its possible effects, with a focus on the question of why listeners are experiencing pleasure and reward. Though it is tempting to seek for a causal relationship, this has proven to be elusive given the many intermediary variables that intervene between the actual impingement on the senses and the reactions/responses by the listener. A distinction can be made, however, between three elements: (i) an objective description of the acoustic features of the music and their possible role as elicitors; (ii) a description of the possible modulating factors—both external/exogenous and internal/endogenous ones; and (iii) a continuous and real-time description of the responses by the listener, both in terms of their psychological reactions and their physiological correlates. Music listening, in this broadened view, can be considered as a multivariate phenomenon of biological, psychological, and cultural factors that, together, shape the overall, full-fledged experience. In addition to an overview of the current and extant research on musical enjoyment and reward, we draw attention to some key methodological problems that still complicate a full description of the musical experience. We further elaborate on how listening may entail both adaptive and maladaptive ways of coping with the sounds, with the former allowing a gentle transition from mere hedonic pleasure to eudaimonic enjoyment.

The last decades have seen a proliferation of music and brain studies, with a major focus on plastic changes as the outcome of continuous and prolonged engagement with music. Thanks to the advent of neuroaesthetics, research on music cognition has broadened its scope by considering the multifarious phenomenon of listening in all its forms, including incidental listening up to the skillful attentive listening of experts, and all its possible effects. These latter range from objective and sensorial effects directly linked to the acoustic features of the music to the subjectively affective and even transformational effects for the listener. Of special importance is the finding that neural activity in the reward circuit of the brain is a key component of a conscious listening experience. We propose that the connection between music and the reward system makes music listening a gate towards not only hedonia but also eudaimonia, namely a life well lived, full of meaning that aims at realizing one’s own “daimon” or true nature. It is argued, further, that music listening, even when conceptualized in this aesthetic and eudaimonic framework, remains a learnable skill that changes the way brain structures respond to sounds and how they interact with each other.

Listening to music is above all a human experience, which becomes an aesthetic experience when an individual immerses himself/herself in the music, dedicating attention to perceptual-cognitive-affective interpretation and evaluation. The study of these processes where the individual perceives, understands, enjoys and evaluates a set of auditory stimuli has mainly been focused on the effect of music on specific brain structures, as measured with neurophysiology and neuroimaging techniques. The very recent application of network science algorithms to brain research allows an insight into the functional connectivity between brain regions. These studies in network neuroscience have identified distinct circuits that function during goal-directed tasks and resting states. We review recent neuroimaging findings which indicate that music listening is traceable in terms of network connectivity and activations of target regions in the brain, in particular between the auditory cortex, the reward brain system and brain regions active during mind wandering.

Listening to music can span a continuum from passive consumption to active exploration, relying on processes of coping with the sounds as well as higher-level processes of sense-making. Revolving around the major questions of “what” and “how” to explore, this paper takes a naturalistic stance toward music listening, providing tools to objectively describe the underlying mechanisms of musical sense-making by weakening the distinction between music and non-music. Starting from a non-exclusionary conception of “coping” with the sounds, it stresses the exploratory approach of treating music as a sound environment to be discovered by an attentive listener. Exploratory listening, in this view, is an open-minded and active process, not dependent on simply recalling pre-existing knowledge or information that reduces cognitive processing efforts but having a high cognitive load due to the need for highly focused attention and perceptual readiness. Music, explored in this way, is valued for its complexity, surprisingness, novelty, incongruity, puzzlingness, and patterns, relying on processes of selection, differentiation, discrimination, and identification.

Coping is a survival mechanism of living organisms. It is not merely reactive, but also involves making sense of the environment by rendering sensory information into percepts that have meaning in the context of an organism’s cognitions. Music listening, on the other hand, is a complex task that embraces sensory, physiological, behavioral, and cognitive levels of processing. Being both a dispositional process that relies on our evolutionary toolkit for coping with the world and a more elaborated skill for sense-making, it goes beyond primitive action–reaction couplings by the introduction of higher-order intermediary variables between sensory input and effector reactions. Consideration of music-listening from the perspective of coping treats music as a sound environment and listening as a process that involves exploration of this environment as well as interactions with the sounds. Several issues are considered in this regard such as the conception of music as a possible stressor, the role of adaptive listening, the relation between coping and reward, the importance of self-regulation strategies in the selection of music, and the instrumental meaning of music in the sense that it can be used to modify the internal and external environment of the listener.

This paper explores the importance of preconceptual meaning in speech and music, stressing the role of affective vocalizations as a common ancestral instrument in communicative interactions. Speech and music are sensory rich stimuli, both at the level of production and perception, which involve different body channels, mainly the face and the voice. However, this bimodal approach has been challenged as being too restrictive. A broader conception argues for an action-oriented embodied approach that stresses the reciprocity between multisensory processing and articulatory-motor routines. There is, however, a distinction between language and music, with the latter being largely unable to function referentially. Contrary to the centrifugal tendency of language to direct the attention of the receiver away from the text or speech proper, music is centripetal in directing the listener’s attention to the auditory material itself. Sound, therefore, can be considered as the meeting point between speech and music and the question can be raised as to the shared components between the interpretation of sound in the domain of speech and music. In order to answer these questions, this paper elaborates on the following topics: (i) The relationship between speech and music with a special focus on early vocalizations in humans and non-human primates; (ii) the transition from sound to meaning in speech and music; (iii) the role of emotion and affect in early sound processing; (iv) vocalizations and nonverbal affect burst in communicative sound comprehension; and (v) the acoustic features of affective sound with a special emphasis on temporal and spectrographic cues as parts of speech prosody and musical expressiveness.