The intriguing title of this book only hints at the even greater intrigue of its contents. Herbert presents an unusual synthesis of ideas from consciousness studies, ethology, evolutionary psychology, hypnotherapy and phenomenology to frame her empirical studies of everyday experiences of listening to music. She sets the scene by describing past and current approaches to the study of music listening, emphasizing both recent functional descriptions of music's ‘use’ in everyday life, as well as research on music-induced emotions. What is missing in this story, according to the author, is not so much ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ people listen to music, but ‘what’ that experience is like. In the second chapter, an introduction to ways of conceptualizing such conscious experience is presented, in which Herbert draws on a disparate literature to broadly define the constructs of altered states of consciousness and trancing. Trancing is defined as ‘a process characterized by a decreased orientation to consensual reality, a decreased critical faculty, a selective internal or external focus, together with a changed sensory awareness’ (p. 5). In the third chapter, empirical accounts of the phenomenology of everyday music listening experience are presented, gathered from interview and diary data. These accounts generally point to a ‘distributed and fluctuating attention’ (p. 81) during music listening, which is likened to trancing. The following chapter is devoted to a more in-depth exploration of music listening as a form of everyday trancing, distinguishing between episodes of apparent absorption (total involvement) and dissociation (detachment).
To my mind, the greatest strengths of ‘Everyday Music Listening’ are its rich resource of phenomenological material, and its fearless asking of the big questions concerning conscious experience. Outlining ways in which music listening is associated with absorption or dissociation appears to be a useful theoretical approach. Perhaps the best definition of both terms only occurs on p. 113, where we learn that ‘absorbed trancing is characterized by an occupation with sensation and it is preoccupation with the stimulus itself that encourages a positive sense of absorption’. Dissociative trancing seems to ‘dull consciousness either by numbing or flooding it, i.e. to stand outside or detach from experience’. Herbert emphasizes that the concepts frequently overlap, but categorises episodes depending on the extent to which they primarily describe one or the other. Often her examples could fit any category.
How does involvement in music listening differ from involvement in eating a bar of chocolate? This provocative but legitimate question is explored using additional examples such as TV watching, reading and gardening. Continuing to draw on accounts from diary and interview participants, Herbert reveals that changes in sensory awareness are common to all these everyday experiences. Multisensory engagement seems to characterize all these various activities, affording ‘numerous entry points to involvement’ (p. 161). Music, however, holds unusual affordances in this respect, with possible entry through acoustic, physical, cultural or personal attributes. Moreover, music features movement, repetition and pattern, all argued to be conducive to trancing.
A central component of Herbert's thesis is that consciousness is fluctuating and diffuse. As I read, I became increasingly aware of my own fluctuating involvement with the text, which is scholarly and dense. Herbert is commendably concerned to avoid being prescriptive, both in terms of her respondents’ experiences, and also in terms of defining consciousness, attention, trancing, etc. These constructs are not simple or discrete, but as a result, the book at times feels like an exercise in diffuse attention. A more explicit signposting and linking of key ideas from chapter to chapter might have helped the reader to relate to what are necessarily fleeting snapshots of conscious experience. Fortunately, very useful summaries at the end of each chapter are provided.
Herbert is critical of the use of questionnaire and sampling methods to study everyday experience, since these conceal its quality. Accordingly, she reports qualitative accounts of experience that were elicited from participants by semi-structured interview or free description. Unfortunately, no information is provided in the methodological preface to indicate whether participants were informed about the researcher's particular interests. This makes it difficult to situate the free phenomenological descriptions that Herbert uses to compare musical with non-musical involvement. What aspects of their everyday life were participants instructed to describe in this diary study? Were they asked to focus on changes in consciousness, or trancing? If so, the picture of everyday experience as primarily concerning trancing might be atypical, and reflect a demand bias. In a section within Chapter 3 entitled ‘Telling it as it is: a note on self-report’, a brief critique of self-report methods is provided, but this fails to take into consideration the endemic issue of participants selecting only a certain type of experience to report. Herbert argues that questionnaires are not well suited to capturing transient experiences such as dream, yet it could equally be argued that the retrospective process of writing a diary entry has the potential for distortion.
It is hard to compare this book to the literature since it is unprecedented in so many ways. Nevertheless, important work that is cited includes the sociological study of music in everyday life by Tia DeNora (Reference DENORA2000), and a theoretical paper by Juslin & Västfjäll (Reference JUSLIN and VÄSTFJÄLL2008), who outline the possible mechanisms underlying emotional responses to music. Another area of literature featured in this book concerns evolutionary theories of the arts. Specifically, Herbert argues that the human imaginative faculty developed via the acquisition of long-term memory capacity, and this ‘made possible the contemplation of alternative realities and possibilities beyond everyday experience’ (p. 184). Perhaps one omission is the small but growing body of research in musical imagery, or the experience of imagining music in everyday life. While Herbert and her respondents seem to consider imagining music to be a form of listening to music, others have considered it as a distinct phenomenon, worthy of study in its own right (e.g. Bailes, Reference BAILES2006; Bailes, Reference BAILES2007; Beaman & Williams, Reference BEAMAN and WILLIAMS2009; Liikkanen, Reference LIIKKANEN2012).
This book contributes to knowledge in ways that the author herself might not have appreciated. As a researcher of imagined musical experience, I was excited by the possible application of Herbert's thesis of trancing in everyday listening to the everyday imagining of music. While the author frequently relates her respondents’ episodes of musical imagery, or audiation (e.g. Max who mentally replays a track just heard in the car on a train journey), she does not analyse such experiences as exceptionally pertinent to her framework of consciousness. Yet considering musical imagery as a special case could strengthen her arguments further still. For instance, the looping of music in the mind's ear (sometimes known as earworms), as happens to Louise when she hears ‘La donna e mobile’ repeatedly going round in her head (p. 113), produces the repetitive patterns that Herbert describes as conducive to trancing. Indeed, she acknowledges that audiation can be used to reduce thought, a form of dissociative process. The author focuses on the mediation of technology in everyday listening, emphasizing the portability of music, the ability to customize it, and its multimodal potential situated within an external setting. Yet technology is not needed for an individual to ‘listen’ to their own mental image of music, with all these features intact.
Another compelling idea that Herbert explores is the psychobiological notion of ‘ultradian cyclicity’, ‘a physiological or behavioural cycle that occurs more than once during a 24-hour (circadian) period’ (p. 202). The basic premise is that changes in consciousness might relate to naturally occurring psychobiological alternations between rest and activity. Drawing on the work of Andrjez Kokoszka, we learn that ‘the ‘active’ phase corresponds with periods of goal-directed focused attention, while the ‘rest’ phase involves a passive inwardly directed focus featuring spontaneous, imaginative activity’ (p. 203). The parallel with phenomenological accounts of trancing in everyday listening contexts that Herbert has assembled is clear, and she suggests that music listening (and other hobbies) may function ‘as external justifications for periods of mental and physical recuperation’ (p. 203). Again, such ideas could be related not just to music listening, but also to the occurrence of musical imagery during the course of daily life. I look forward to the adoption and development of Herbert's ideas within the field of involuntary musical imagery research, but also more broadly by scholars of music psychology, philosophy and sociology.
