Affordances and the musically extended mind

• Main Author: Joel eKrueger
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-01-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: Emotions; Music; Emotion Regulation; Phenomenology; affordances; extended cognition
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01003/full

I defend a model of the musically extended mind. I consider how acts of musicking grant access to novel emotional experiences otherwise inaccessible. First, I discuss the idea of musical affordances and specify both what musical affordances are and how they invite different forms of entrainment. Next, I argue that musical affordances—via soliciting different forms of entrainment—enhance the functionality of various endogenous, emotion-granting regulative processes, drawing novel experiences out of us with an expanded complexity and phenomenal character. I suggest that music therefore ought to be thought of as part of the vehicle needed to realize these emotional experiences. I appeal to different sources of empirical work to develop this idea.