Young People’s Lived Experience of Music in Everyday Life: Psychological and Phenomenological Perspectives

Over the last decade there has been growing psychological interest in studying everyday experiences with and of music in ways that bypass a selective focus on musical function, mood, emotion, perception of musical attributes. Ecological perspectives on music listening, where experience is understood as the multimodal sum of a systemic interaction between perceiver, environment and musical attributes, have also been influential. This has been reflected in an increase in the number of empirical studies exhibiting a phenomenological approach. However, little research has explicitly addressed children and adolescents' holistic interactions with music. Drawing on findings from a mixed method empirical inquiry into UK 10-18-year olds involvement with music (employing interpretative phenomenological analysis), this chapter explores the phenomenology of children and adolescent's unfolding, lived experiences of music in everyday scenarios. It discusses ways in which the subjective experience of music across this time-span changes, in terms of psychological characteristics, kinds of consciousness and meanings attached to music. Key themes are related to topics within the philosophical phenomenological tradition and the relationship between philosophical and psychological understandings of phenomenology are considered.