Conceptualising the Subjective Experience of Listening to Music in Everyday Life

Taking consciousness, rather than mood and motion as its starting point, this paper promotes an inclusive approach towards charting the subjective experience of listening to music in everyday life. Acknowledging that different constructs/vocabularies frame experience in different ways, it explores: 1. Categorizations of aspects of conscious experience used outside music psychology, such as checklists of basic dimensions of characteristics of transformations of consciousness (e.g. Pekala's Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI), Vaitl et al.'s (2005) four-dimension descriptive system for altered states of consciousness, Tart's (1983) eleven subsystems of consciousness), in addition to music-specific categorizations of experience such as Gabrielsson and Lindström Wik's descriptive system for strong experiences with music (SEM-DSM); 2. The potential impact of specific kinds of consciousness upon experience (e.g. the notion of present centred (core or primary), and autobiographical (extended/higher order) forms of consciousness (Damasio, 1999, Edelman, 1989). 3. Theoretical constructs relating to the subjective feel of the totality of experience, rather than to individual cognitive, sensory-affective characteristics e.g. absorption, trance, dissociation, flow and instances perceived by individuals as 'states of mind'.1 Three recent empirical studies (Herbert, 2011) which used unstructured diaries and semi-structured interviews to explore the psychological processes of everyday involving experiences with music in a range of 'real-world' UK scenarios are referenced.