Rachel Elliott

This chapter asks what we can know through music. I present Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” as epistemological in nature and extend the claims that he makes there about painting to music. To bolster this interpretive move, I discuss Merleau-Ponty’s contemporaneous writings, which, I argue, point to the beginnings of a musical epistemology that was never completed. I connect the epistemological approach to music that I present via Merleau-Ponty to current approaches to the study of music in the ‘4e’ cognitive sciences.

While musical experiences take up our personal and cultural history through the habit body, musical experiences are nevertheless also deeply social. In this chapter I discuss the role of other people in shaping our musical experiences on three levels. First, I consider the way that others can provide gestural leadership for our listening practices, enabling us to appreciate music that does not immediately speak to our existing habit bodies. Second, I examine accounts that see music itself as akin to another person which suggests that it is through empathy that we understand music. Lastly, I try to articulate the sense of belonging that often accompanies collective musical experiences using Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema as a way of theorizing we-experiences that occur through sharing time.

This chapter explores the situational forces that shape our habit bodies, arguing that our embodied habits reflect our environment as well as our social embeddedness. Habit bodies are thus construed as expressions and markers of identity that are based in our regional affiliation, race, gender, and ability, among other factors. This chapter furthermore explores the connection between our musical tastes and our habit bodies, suggesting that music can express regional patterns of perception and can, in this way, bolster intersectional vectors of identity.

Drawing a link between music and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the habit body – a quasi-transcendental structure at the heart of our perceptual, social, and agential being – this book helps articulate why music has the power to express as well as shape our existence at a fundamental level. Using phenomenology, research in the cognitive sciences, and first-person descriptions of musical experiences, this book addresses topics such as the relationship of music to identity, the capacity of music to be personally and socially transformative, the role of music in our perception of others, the connection between music and trauma, and the possibility of engendering we-experiences through shared musical time.

One way that we connect with others in we-experience comes through sharing time. However, questions have been raised as to whether time can be shared between normates and misfits. In this paper, I illustrate the concept of sharing time across bodily difference using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of body schematic temporality from the Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962). I explore how we-experiences can be fostered through shared time across bodily difference in two contexts: becoming ill and playing music.

Ambiguity in our experience of embodiment online has prevented us from confidently extending existing scholarship to the domain of online sociality. In recent decades, research across the disciplines has been undergirded by themes related to embodiment, restoring to prominence a theme previously neglected in part thanks to the rise of feminist scholars within the academy. We have not, however, adequately appealed to this corpus when theorizing forms of life happening online. In this paper I hope to bridge this gap by bringing forward phenomenological evidence about the nature of online embodiment. This paper presents the findings from a research project that used phenomenological interviews to elicit descriptions of lived embodiment from participants singing in online choirs during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that these descriptions reveal anchoring and discounting as central features of their experience, two dynamics of the body schema as described by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception that underpin participant experiences of sensory disjunction. I furthermore take pains to show how the form of embodiment operative in the online choirs has the characteristics of intercorporeality, a reciprocal two-sided form of embodied subjectivity. After explaining how Husserl and Merleau-Ponty each define intercorporeality, I suggest that what I am calling an auditory intercorporeality underlies reported features of participant experience in the choirs, such as we-experience and coordination.

Schütz’ tuning-in relationship designates sharing time as the ground of we-experiences, but the Husserlian account of time that he relies upon for this argument seems to undermine the very possibility of doing so. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s conception of temporality offers a more plausible account of shared time via the ‘transferability’ of the body schema. Disability theorists and critical phenomenologists, however, would remind us that any account of we-experiences must recognize bodily difference. I argue that bodies of diverse motilities can come to share a body schema without risk of ‘forced time compliance’ if we jettison synchronization and embrace improvisation as a paradigm for schematic sharing: I use the example of collective free improvisation to illustrate flexible, emergent, and bidirectional body schemas that, I claim, circumvent the assimilationist tendencies looming in any account of we-experiences premised upon bodily sameness.

There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand this role in terms of our habitual relationships to place, asking whether and how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, and with what consequences. This inquiry is anchored in a series of site-specific improvised performances by Jen Reimer and Max Stein, and the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. The argument made interpreting these performances is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, and Alia Al-Saji’s reception of it. This paper claims that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations.