Multimodales Musikhören und Milton Ericksons ›gewöhnliche Alltagstrance‹

Aesthetic objects (including music) do not constitute complete sensory virtual worlds. Neither is any experience of music entirely autonomous. Listening is inevitably performative; sensory and meaning ›gaps‹ are ›filled in‹ through a range of cognitive, sensory and affective responses (e.g. imagining, blending of the visual with the aural). This requires an ecological model of listening in which experience is understood as the sum of the interaction between perceiver, environment and stimulus attributes of music. Heteronomous, multimodal listening can serve as a common model of listening in daily life, yet one that is often dismissed by scholars as superficial. Against this background, this chapter further develops a central theme of my book Everyday Music Listening (2011), that synthesis of different components of experience in multimodal everyday listening episodes affords consciousness transformation in a manner similar to that of a formal hypnotherapeutic induction. Moreover, the phenomenology of such episodes corresponds with what the clinical psychologist Milton Erickson identified as the »common everyday trance«. I draw on findings from my ongoing empirical studies of the psychological processes present in real-world, technologically mediated solitary experiences of music. Phenomenological reports (free descriptions and interview data) support a model of consciousness during everyday music listening as a dynamic system, made up of a series of interacting variables. If music is privileged above other components of experience (by framing everyday music listening episodes primarily as experiences of music), the contributory importance and interaction between the different components of experience is skewed and the totality of experience obscured. Music is a non-prescriptive multifaceted stimulus. It provides a diverse range of potential entry points for consciousness transformation via the multiple foci for attention that it affords and is frequently present in what Erickson recognized as instances of spontaneous trance in everyday life.