The aim of this book was to present an account of music as it relates to everyday experience. It is, by design, introductory in style and content and for this reason it will be invaluable for students and the general public. For scholars working outside the field of music psychology it will promote interdisciplinary exchange and a bridge between the arts, humanities and sciences. It covers considerable ground most elegantly and picks out key topics as sites of debate and future research across chapter topics that include musical skill, performance matters, composition and improvisation, listening, music's use (individual and group) and musical learning and development.

I read Music, Mind and Everyday Life with especial interest since it addresses and presents alternative framings of a number of areas that I have dealt with in my own work, Music in Everyday Life (DeNora, 2000) – entrainment, affordance, emotion regulation, technology of self, social control and collective action. For me this book highlights how the psychology and sociology of music can be mutually enhancing and in ways that necessarily embrace research developments in music education.

Scholars in adjacent fields who want a quick study guide to music psychology will do well to begin with chapter 10, an excellent review of the field that focuses on developments since the 1980s. In particular the charting of the cognitive tradition as it came to be enriched with ‘qualitative, social and developmental directions’ (p. 177) maps the move toward the everyday and with it, to points of common interest with musicology, music sociology, ethnomusicology and music education. As the authors note, the project of an everyday psychology of music is one that brushes music history and music psychology against the grain. It turns away from ideologically loaded, geographically and historically specific notions of music as an object (p. 170), reuniting music with its contexts of human activity. It illuminates music, or rather, musicking as implicit to human association, to subjectivity and to action. It also underscores music as an interpretively flexible medium and not necessarily always amenable to the one-to-one correspondences and reductionism that quantitative and experimental methods would imply (p. 171). And finally, it is concerned with ecological validity, namely how music actually works, in real world, real-time situations and settings.

The authors point to ‘two broad approaches [which] dominate current musicological and philosophical theories of musical meaning’ (p. 74), formalist, which ‘conceives of musical meaning in terms of musical structure’ and constructivist, which conceives of the link between meaning (or, more generally, perception and response) and music's sonic characteristics to be ‘more or less arbitrary’ (p. 74). They then suggest that it is possible to ‘understand meaning as both dependent on musical structure and culturally constructed’ if music is conceived in terms of its ‘potential for particular meanings to emerge given particular circumstances’ which they relate to concept of affordance, in the sense that Clarke (Reference CLARKE2005), DeNora (Reference DeNORA2000) and Hennion (Reference HENNION2007) have used the term in slightly varied ways for music study.

As Clarke, Dibben and Pitts conceive them, the links between music's sonic properties and what it affords are at times too tightly coupled for my own conceptual comfort, though I found their discussion exceptionally fruitful. For example, the authors suggest that seemingly pure emotional experiences, that is, emotions without associated cognitive appraisals, can be explained by reference to musical structures, rather as they can by certain arousal-inducing drugs (pp. 88–89). Thus music may induce unspecified emotional reactions which can be disambiguated from any specific biographical interpretations. Put another way, the form of the emotional experience is musically afforded, while its content is contextually mediated. As the authors say, ‘it affords the experience of shared purpose between individuals or groups even when there may be disagreements’ (p. 89).

This account of musical ontology is deeply attractive. It returns us to a ‘strong’ version of music studies, one that is devoted to illuminating the musical object as it gets into action and mental process, indeed, as it inscribes the very brain. Such a move simultaneously ensures, in other words, a place – and indeed a wider space in the disciplinary arena – for music analysis. How this notion will be combined with theories of culture, context, biography and learning will, of course, be subject to continued debate, a sign, moreover, that the field of socio-musical studies is growing and continuing to warm up. In short, this book will be invaluable to scholars working across a number of disciplines. Music and Mind in Everyday Life offers a framework for music psychology that is both open to other understandings of the musical object and that is aimed at forging an even greater space for the study of everyday musical experience.