Consciousness and everyday Music Listening: Trancing, Dissociation and Absorption

This chapter explores the range of consciousness occurring within the everyday music experiences of a small sample of UK listeners, particularly those experiences lying between the extremes of intense, emotional involvement, and apparent inattention when music, though present, seems to be barely perceived. Specifically, it draws on the constructs of trance, absorption, and dissociation as explicatory frames that throw into relief the self-regulating character — in psychological terms — of much everyday listening. By concentrating on the detailed nature of music listening episodes as lived experiences it becomes possible to offer a phenomenology of everyday listening, thus ‘reclaiming’ it for comparison with the literature on strong experiences.