This article is a continuation of the series introducing distinct therapeutic functions of music and What Makes Music Therapeutic?
Our early life was one ongoing stream of experience. Unbounded and unpredictable. And learning how to navigate these waves of subjectivity is the infants’ most essential, challenging and intricate tasks to master at first.
How to soothe bodily chaos and emotional storms , and how to meet the fundamental need for nourishment, safety and human connection. Whatever it is that screams for change, in these earliest moments of life, this change comes not from within but from outside.
We learned that some of our cries could magically evoke a world of warm breasts and milky nourishments. Whereas others seemed to reliably summon the wildest joy or the deepest peace.
Through the consistent, reliable and soothing presence of significant others, by engaging those on which we entirely depended on, we learned how to co-create containment. We found ways to regulate subjective experiences and accomplish what felt most urgently needed.
Slowly, gradually but steadily, a sense of self emerged. We started to distinguish non-me from me, and adopted ways to act upon non-me for both pleasure and protection.
In ancient Indian classical music, most notably Dhrupad, the sustained musical harmonics created by tanpura’s are not merely a background accompaniment for the vocalists or other instruments. It expresses the unbounded, infinite essence of reality (Brahman): The eternal ocean from which the self is born, and to which it returns.
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Our capacity to recognise and remember musical properties is amongst our first skills in life. Hearing emerges approximately five months before birth, and implicit musical learning has been detected during the third trimester of pregnancy.
From this point on, through birth and onwards, we enter a period marked by heightened neuroplasticity and accelerated learning, that relies heavily on communicative musicality: the innate capacity to engage with the tonal, rhythmic, timbral dimensions of sound, including its contours and dynamic patterning in time.
More specifically, musical qualities of sound became key ingredients in the creation of the self. Step by step, or more accurately put, sound by sound we learned how to tame these stormy waves of tensions and anxieties.
Through sound we developed intersubjectivity. As I wrote in Part 2 of this series, our first attachment figures are perceived and internalised, quite literally as musical entities.
Through sound, we managed to establish some degrees of order. We learned how to restore peace and harmony. And we gradually succeeded in making life more predictable.
Through sound, we learned how to live.
This video shows a newborn baby mimicking the musical features of the dad's voice.
As we have explored previously in detail, the self does not develop or express itself as some kind of clearly delineated and solid entity. It is dynamic constellation of processes.
These processes are internalised from experiences that informed how we are expected to interface with the world successfully. These are, in turn, later in life selectively enacted and re-enacted by the present context.
From neuroscience research on learning and memory we have learned how much this development of a self 1) happens through experienced-based learning, 2) is biased by significance and 3) is bounded by history.
As I formulated in my article The Experiential Foundations for Change, the self is determined by the significance perceived within the experience to the self, and constrained by the learning opportunities it had in life. The brain is innately driven to optimise itself, to pay attention to what matters most, but is naturally limited by its repertoire of learnings.
Before moving further, the implications of these insights are important to digest and recognise well: For the infant and the developing child, given their dependency, the lack of a self, and as such, self-regulating mechanisms - the significance and affective charge of these early-life experiences is arguably amongst the most intense imaginable.
Life depends on these experiences. When fundamental needs are not met, the initial anxiety becomes terror. Disintegration and death become a closer reality.
These critical formative experiences that are largely musical in nature, are therefore to be recognised as immensely salient, most significant, and hence, highly impactful on the development of the self.
As I said my article The Musical Nature of Consciousness:
Not only are these initial schema-systems ontologically ancient, we need to realise that these models of meaning making occur around processes and phenomena that are most significant for the individual infant. They concern the ways we learn how to engage with the most intense existentially-charged tides of life:
How we regulate comfort vs pain, relaxation vs tension, satisfaction vs hunger, being in peace vs being in a state of terror, feeling safe vs feeling insecure, being in “heaven” vs being “hell”, when, how, with whom to attach or detach, etc.
The most influential experiences that shape how we fundamentally perceive the world and our place within it are entirely non-verbal and predominantly musical.
In short, amongst the very first foundations of the mind of the developing infant are literally musical in nature. The resulting memory systems that continue to influence the qualities of all our subsequent life experiences have inherent musical qualities.
Because of the primacy of musicality for the infant when navigating the challenges of living that so significantly shaped the self, I refer to the musical qualities that are encoded and internalised from these formative experiences from here on as the musical self.
The musical self is enacted when these internalised musical qualities are engaged in the interfacing process with self, other and world. They re-enact the processes that sit at the origin of these musical patterns.
in contrast to the previous, this video shows a newborn baby not so interested in mimicking the musical features of the dad's voice. The possible reasons I leave to you to speculate on.
Having defined the musical self, I will now introduce a closely related concept: musical enactment.
I define musical enactment as the enactment that emerges via an interplay between the musical self and the musical qualities perceived in the present context.
For simplicity, I use musical enactment here to encompass both enactment and re-enactment processes. As I described in The Experiential Foundations of Change:
A key component to the concept of self-enactment is more precisely that it operates upon the history of processes that are internalised as memory, through accumulated life experiences. The self thus emerges from the engagement of memory systems, activated by the present context, and actively re-experienced within it.
I propose that musical enactment offers an integrative and heuristic conceptual lens to understand the subjective experience of music, and to work with music in therapeutic contexts.
In particular, I will illustrate how musical enactment can explain the diversity we see in subjective experiences with music. In the not so uncommonly extremely polarising responses that different individuals can have to the exact same piece of music.
The concept of musical enactment enables us to move beyond a merely descriptive account of “musical preferences”. Rather than simply cataloguing what people like or not, we really need to ask what these preferences might in fact signify.
Musical enactment situates subjective musical responses within the unique ways each listener’s inner history is expressed, remembered, and re-lived through musical forms. It implies that musical preferences are not just a taste, but more like shadows of past experiences that we had or did not have.
Musical enactment hereby becomes a (trans)diagnostic tool, a unique window into the structure of the self of the listener, as well as a climate for implicit learning and transformation.
When we listen to music, its effects extend well beyond the ears and the auditory cortex. Always trying to make sense of experience, the entire brain collaborates holistically to create subjective experiences that are charged with meaning.
Crucially, musical enactment is not based on the conscious recollection of melodies, timbre or rhythms, but on processes that operate beneath awareness that are highly associative in nature.
One study on music-evoked autobiographical memory stated that in this way “Music may become a proxy for, or a pointer to, those thoughts, memories, and emotions that are evoked as one follows along with the music in one's mind.”
Musical enactment is thus not something that the listener consciously decides to respond to. But neither is it something that simply happens to the listener, passively received.
Musical enactment has a primordial, pre-verbal and seductive quality that is creative and directly lived. Like a very vivid dream, it is something that the listener actively becomes.
As I already allured to in part 1 of this series, the reason why music can enact consciousness with such realism, I argue has to do with it’s remarkable accuracy, immediacy and significance:
Accuracy: Music communicates subjective qualities of consciousness including its temporal dynamics. Not only evokes music imagery and feelings, but the dynamic contours and evolution of a set of imagery and feelings.
Immediacy: Music communicates subjective experiences with immense directness. They are felt fully and immediately by the listener’s full faculties (body, emotion, mind), in an un-ignorable and “contagious” manner.
Significance: These musical experiences are not put onto the listener from the outside, but are created via an interaction between the qualities of the composition and the resonance of these with the meaning-making apparatus of the listener.
Having introduced and outlined the core ideas around musical enactment, we will bring this concept increasingly more to life over the next parts.
Next, we will expand our understanding of the rich multi-sensory nature of musical enactment, the underlying neuroscience and its therapeutic significance.
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