Psychological Characteristics of Subjective Experiences of Popular Music in Everyday Life

Streaming platforms, video-sharing platforms and mobile technologies are a ubiquitous part of everyday life, allowing individuals to use music to interweave with and mediate a more diverse range of contexts and activities than ever before. For Generation Z in particular (those born in the late ‘90s onwards), digital technologies have played a central role in shaping personal modes of listening and ways of engaging with music. This talk addresses the phenomenology (subjective ‘feel’) of unfolding lived experiences of listening to popular music in daily life. I draw on qualitative empirical data from several research projects to explore the psychological processes involved in musical reception, charting the interaction between individual, musical attributes and environment in a range of real-world contexts. I highlight some key characteristics of experiences of music, including the prevalence of multimodal listening, age-related differences in listening and the use of music to effect subtle self-regulatory dissociative and absorbed shifts of consciousness.