Embodied, Exploratory Listening in the Concert Hall.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) May 21, 2025 Remy Haswell-Martin, Finn Upham, Simon Høffding et al. 3 citations
Live music can create transformative, personal aesthetic experiences for listeners, yet concert research often emphasizes shared responses. This paper examines exploratory listening through embodied-enactive engagement and affective resonance, analyzing data from two musically skilled audience members who heard Harald Sæverud's 'Kjempeviseslåtten' (1943) performed by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and The Norwegian Radio Orchestra in 2024. Combining phenomenological interviews with measurements of breathing and body motion, the authors find forms of absorbed, imaginative, and embodied involvement that both corroborate crowd patterns and reveal individual exploratory expertise and idiosyncratic affective orientations, challenging a sole focus on synchronized response.