Musicing, materiality, and the emotional niche

Abstract

Building on Elliot and Silverman’s (2014) embodied and enactive approach to musicing, I argue for an extended approach: namely, the idea that music can function as an environmental scaffolding supporting the development of various experiences and embodied practices that would otherwise remain inaccessible. I focus especially on the materiality of music. I argue that one of the central ways we use music, as a material resource, is to manipulate social space—and in so doing, manipulate our emotions. Acts of musicing, thought of as processes of environmental space manipulation, are thus examples of what I term “emotional niche construction”. I explore three dimensions of this process and appeal to different strands of empirical work to support this picture