Listening Inside Out: Notes on an embodied analysis

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Notes

¹ In Sounding New Media, Frances Dyson suggests: ‘obvious inhalation and exhalation of the breath signifies shock … or fear’ and physical/emotional states such as terror or joy that ‘can be expressed only through a non-linguistic, nonvocal exhalation’ (Dyson 2009: 113).

² In ‘The Mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical Meaning’, Arnie Cox draws on aspects of music psychology to argue that listeners use their own past experience of producing the same or similar sounds in order to relate mimetically, either implicitly or explicitly, to the musical sounds they are hearing (Cox 2001). Andrew Mead describes a similar reaction. He reports finding himself in intense pain when listening to a live performance of an oboe concerto. He found he had been breathing along with the soloist, who, unknown to Mead, had been employing circular breathing techniques. Mead uses this anecdote to consider how the sound of music is ‘an embodiment of [its] making, and that hearing that making in the sound had much to do with [his] understanding of the music’ (Mead 1999: 2).