Absorbed Concert Listening: A Qualitative, Phenomenological Inquiry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors, I read your manuscript with much interest. I believe it is of good quality, but I also think certain aspects could benefit from revision and refinement to enhance clarity, depth, and rigor. Below are my specific comments and suggestions:

1) The abstract could be improved for greater coherence and efficiency. Currently, it seemingly shifts between different concepts and references in a manner that might confuse readers. A more linear progression would better serve to frame the study’s objectives, methods, and findings succinctly.

2) The overall flow of the manuscript could be improved. For example, lines 50-58 lack seamless transitions between ideas. A revision to ensure conceptual coherence across sections would enhance readability.

3) In the literature survey (lines 83 and following), incorporating works by Marc Leman would provide valuable context, particularly regarding embodiment and music perception. Relevant references include:

• Leman, M., & Maes, P. J. (2014). The role of embodiment in the perception of music. Empirical Musicology Review, 9(3-4), 236-246.
• Leman, M. (2010). Music, gesture, and the formation of embodied meaning. In Musical gestures (pp. 138-165). Routledge.
• Leman, M., Nijs, L., & Di Stefano, N. (2017). On the role of the hand in the expression of music. In The hand: Perception, cognition, action (pp. 175-192).

4) The discussion of passivity, particularly the interpretation of absorption as something beyond one’s control, raises intriguing questions. Is this lack of control attributed to ignorance of the underlying processes or to a more foundational inability to control them? For instance, individuals trained in meditation can demonstrate an enhanced ability to modulate brain activity. Clarifying this distinction and possibly incorporating relevant research on meditation or neuroplasticity could strengthen the argument.

5) Line 198 contains a typo: “involutory” 

6) I have a couple of methodological thoughts to share:

• Why not employing large language models (LLMs) or other AI tools to extract and analyze data from interviews? These tools could complement qualitative methods and uncover patterns or themes more systematically.
• Why not introducing a visual analog scale (VAS) for certain interview items to allow for quantitative data collection and statistical testing? This could enable the identification of item clusters or provide a more granular understanding of responses.

7) The dynamic between spatialized and aspatialized experiences, such as “absorbed not-being-there” versus the impact of physical seating, is fascinating. Expanding on the use of spatial metaphors in music experience could enhance this analysis. Consider referencing 

8) The concept of atmosphere might enrich the manuscript’s theoretical framework, as it integrates passive/pathic dimensions with emotional and spatialized experiences. It has been employed in music studies, as seen in the following works:

• Bertinetto, A. (2019). Parker’s mood. Emotional atmospheres and musical expressiveness in jazz. Studi di estetica, (14).
• Di Stefano, N. (2023). Musical emotions and timbre: from expressiveness to atmospheres. Philosophia, 51(5), 2625-2637.

Incorporating this concept could provide additional depth to the analysis, particularly in examining interview data.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

I guess the manuscript would benefit from careful language revision to improve flow. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

Thank you for your reading, meticulous comments, and constructive suggestions. We have revised the article throughout. Major changes are marked with red in the article. Below we reply to each of your comments one at the time.

Reviewer 1:

Dear authors, I read your manuscript with much interest. I believe it is of good quality, but I also think certain aspects could benefit from revision and refinement to enhance clarity, depth, and rigor. Below are my specific comments and suggestions:

1) The abstract could be improved for greater coherence and efficiency. Currently, it seemingly shifts between different concepts and references in a manner that might confuse readers. A more linear progression would better serve to frame the study’s objectives, methods, and findings succinctly.

Thank you. We have re-written the abstract. It now reads: This paper pursues a phenomenological investigation of the nature of absorbed listening in Western, classical music concert audiences. This investigation is based on a data-set of 16 in depth, phenomenological interviews with audience members from three classical concerts with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra conducted in spring 2024. We identify seven major themes, namely “sharedness”, “attention”, “spontaneous thought/mental imagery”, “modes of listening” “absorption”, “distraction”, and “strong emotional experiences” and interpret these in the light of relevant ideas in phenomenology, cognitive psychology, and ecological aesthetics, more precisely “passive synthesis” from Husserl, the “sense of agency” from Gallagher, and “mind surfing” from Høffding, Nielsen, and Laeng. We show that like absorbed musical performance, absorbed musical listening comes in many shapes and can be grasped as instantiating variations of passive synthesis, the sense of agency, and mind surfing. We conclude that absorbed listening circles around a kind of paradox of passivity, characterized by a sense of loss of egoic control arising from particular forms of invested, intensive perceptual, cognitive, and affective engagement.

 

2) The overall flow of the manuscript could be improved. For example, lines 50-58 lack seamless transitions between ideas. A revision to ensure conceptual coherence across sections would enhance readability.

We have made minor changes with terminological consistency in mind, throughout the article. Especially the introduction has been streamlined.

3) In the literature survey (lines 83 and following), incorporating works by Marc Leman would provide valuable context, particularly regarding embodiment and music perception. Relevant references include:

• Leman, M., & Maes, P. J. (2014). The role of embodiment in the perception of music. Empirical Musicology Review, 9(3-4), 236-246.
• Leman, M. (2010). Music, gesture, and the formation of embodied meaning. In Musical gestures(pp. 138-165). Routledge.
• Leman, M., Nijs, L., & Di Stefano, N. (2017). On the role of the hand in the expression of music. In The hand: Perception, cognition, action(pp. 175-192).

 

Thank you for pointing us to this omission in our literature review. We’ve made reference to the two first works on page 2: (“This linking of music perception with gesture and embodiment in its affective and cognitive dimensions has also been the subject of extensive investigation by Mark Leman and his laboratory, IPEM, in Ghent (see e.g. Leman, 2009; Leman & Maes 2014).”) and in footnote 10 on page 11.

4) The discussion of passivity, particularly the interpretation of absorption as something beyond one’s control, raises intriguing questions. Is this lack of control attributed to ignorance of the underlying processes or to a more foundational inability to control them? For instance, individuals trained in meditation can demonstrate an enhanced ability to modulate brain activity. Clarifying this distinction and possibly incorporating relevant research on meditation or neuroplasticity could strengthen the argument.

This is a good point, thanks for raising this. We don’t think it is desirable to write a full analysis of the similarities and differences between passivity and brain/body mechanisms, but we certainly want to keep the question open and have added footnote 3 on p. 4:

Though absorption cannot be fully controlled, it could be that certain mental techniques akin to hypnosis or meditation could lead one to more reliably enter such states. In meditation studies, for instance, something as uncontrollable as the startle effect, has been shown to be moduleable for expert Buddhist monks (Levenson et al. 2012).

 

5) Line 198 contains a typo: “involutory” 

Fixed. Thank you.

6) I have a couple of methodological thoughts to share:

• Why not employing large language models (LLMs) or other AI tools to extract and analyze data from interviews? These tools could complement qualitative methods and uncover patterns or themes more systematically.
• Why not introducing a visual analog scale (VAS) for certain interview items to allow for quantitative data collection and statistical testing? This could enable the identification of item clusters or provide a more granular understanding of responses.

These are certainly relevant considerations. We fully agree that it would be interesting to implement these technologies and further that it would have to rely on empirical testing when and where LLM or AI analysis should assist or supplement that of the researchers. We now mention this on p. 8 in footnote 9:

It seems likely that some or most of such coding efforts will soon be handled by AIs or LLMs either assisting or fully supplanting the coding done by the researchers. There is lots to discuss about the pros and cons of this development, not least when one considers that interview analysis is a hermeneutic exercise relying on tacit, embodied knowledge generated between interviewer and interviewee in the live interview situation. This discussion merits several studies and papers on its own, which we look forward to learn from.

Introducing a VAS scale for visualization also sounds like an promising idea. We haven’t seen this in the qualitative tradition before, which of course is no argument not to begin doing so. The short answer to why we haven’t produced a VAS scale, is that we, three researchers very much in the classical humanities, have no clue about how to do so. Yet, as we find ourselves working in interdisciplinary research teams, we will certainly consider acquiring help for something like this in the future.

7) The dynamic between spatialized and aspatialized experiences, such as “absorbed not-being-there” versus the impact of physical seating, is fascinating. Expanding on the use of spatial metaphors in music experience could enhance this analysis. Consider referencing.

Thank you for this suggestion. Like your suggestions to include analyses of atmospheres together with those of other reviewers to work more on affectivity and responsivity, we are certainly open to involving these perspectives in future analyses, but it seems, not least from your point 2, that adding even more theoretical angles to the paper will only increase its complexity. At the end of the section on “Shared space” on p. 14, we’ve added footnote 11:

Undoubtedly, a treatment of this through the lens of conceptual metaphor, which has guided philosophical and musicological analysis (Johnson, 2003; Cox, 2016; Zbikowski, 2017), would be interesting. Furthermore, the spatialised experiences described here could also be analysed through proxemic theory, which has found useful application in key musicological literature (Moore et al., 2009; Moore, 2012), albeit in the context of recorded music.

 

8) The concept of atmosphere might enrich the manuscript’s theoretical framework, as it integrates passive/pathic dimensions with emotional and spatialized experiences. It has been employed in music studies, as seen in the following works:

• Bertinetto, A. (2019). Parker’s mood. Emotional atmospheres and musical expressiveness in jazz. Studi di estetica, (14).
• Di Stefano, N. (2023). Musical emotions and timbre: from expressiveness to atmospheres. Philosophia, 51(5), 2625-2637.

Incorporating this concept could provide additional depth to the analysis, particularly in examining interview data.

This is an excellent suggestion that also overlaps with that of one of the other reviewers. We hope you will excuse that we don’t not fully heed your recommendation as we think it will add even more complexity and length to an already long paper. On page 4, footnote 1, we now mention some of these perspectives that we hope to engage in future work:

There are certainly many other fascinating and relevant phenomenological concepts that could be used to enlighten experiences of absorbed musical listening and we thank our reviewers for mentioning possible future avenues of analysis. First, concert halls are permeated with an intense atmosphere which surely structures the musical experience. Here, it would be apt to employ Herman Schmitz’ work, as well as the application of atmosphere to music as found in Bertinetto, 2019, or Di Stefano 2023. Our phenomenological focus on passivity could also appropriately be widened with perspectives from Bernhard Waldenfels’ work on responsivity or Michel Henry’s on affectivity and self-affection.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

I guess the manuscript would benefit from careful language revision to improve flow. 

We have made minor changes throughout the manuscript. In particular the introduction has been reworked.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article is clearly written and well structured. The qualitative analysis conducted within a phenomenological theoretical framework is not particularly original and presents, in my opinion, a conceptual problem to be clarified. The reference to Husserl's passive syntheses to conceptualise musical absorption (the term ‘frontloaded’ is often used, perhaps one could better clarify what is meant) suggests a pre-predictive type of structuring of experience. However, this seems at odds with some statements of the interviewees who report their engagement with memories of their personal history or even the political history of Norway, which are certainly not ante-predictive experiences but linguistic constructs. It is suggested that one should try to answer this objection in order to strengthen the argument. The article is in any case publishable with minor revisions.

Author Response

Reviewer 2:

The article is clearly written and well structured. The qualitative analysis conducted within a phenomenological theoretical framework is not particularly original and presents, in my opinion, a conceptual problem to be clarified. The reference to Husserl's passive syntheses to conceptualise musical absorption (the term ‘frontloaded’ is often used, perhaps one could better clarify what is meant) suggests a pre-predictive type of structuring of experience. However, this seems at odds with some statements of the interviewees who report their engagement with memories of their personal history or even the political history of Norway, which are certainly not ante-predictive experiences but linguistic constructs. It is suggested that one should try to answer this objection in order to strengthen the argument. The article is in any case publishable with minor revisions.

 

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your work in evaluating our paper. We are glad you find it publishable. You mention that the analysis and framework is not “particularly original” and we’re intrigued by this. Do you simply mean that the results are not surprising (which we to a high extent would agree with) or do you mean that there is previous work published within a similar framework that comes to similar conclusions, and hence that we have overlooked some important sources? If so, we would appreciate knowing what these are.

Thank you for pointing out the lack of definition of front-loaded. We have provided a definition on page 7 stating: “The notion of front-loading comes from Shaun Gallagher, and originally refers to an experimental approach in which one tests hypotheses only after their constituent concepts have been philosophically clarified or defined (Gallagher 2003).”

Your objection with regard to the ante-predicative elements of the concert hall experience, is well taken. We have tried to meet your objection at the end of section 1.2 on p. 5:

The performative passivity delineated here is close, but not identical to terms such as pre-reflective self-awareness or pre-predicative experience. As we shall see, much of the listening absorption to be presented contains descriptions of self-reflection and autobiographical, and even historical memory, none of which qualify as pre-reflective or pre-predicative. For the purposes of the present discussion, the most important distinction pertains to what we might call the mode of production of the experience. While the content of a memory can be both predicative and reflective in character, in our case, it is not produced on purpose, but in a passive receptivity to the music.  

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

First of all, I want to commend you on an impressively written and thought-provoking manuscript. Your arguments are clearly articulated with illustrative case studies and make a strong contribution to the study of musical absorption and phenomenology. The following suggestions represent potential avenues for theoretical expansion and may be adopted at your discretion, depending on the article’s goals and your overall plans:

One clear opportunity arises around the question of agency and passivity in absorption: you draw on Husserl’s passive synthesis and Gallagher’s minimal self distinctions, but you could develop these further by, for instance, engaging with Michel Henry’s account of affectivity or Bernhard Waldenfels’ analyses of responsive experience. Such perspectives might illuminate the felt transformation of self-awareness during musical absorption—the paper consistently treats absorption as either immersion or ex-stasis, but Henry’s emphasis on self-affection could help explain how that shift in “I can” (and the related sense of being moved) arises from the interior pathos of consciousness rather than an externally “given” phenomenon alone.

Likewise, the references to Genuisas’ synthesis of aesthetic and spiritual absorption suggest room to connect your “mind surfing” paradigm with discussions on whether these experiences expand the self’s intentional horizons or, conversely, dissolve them in non-reflective flow. Although you rightly touch on Krueger’s and Clarke’s ecological/enactivist ideas, you could intensify the paper’s philosophical heft by more explicitly situating “mind surfing” within a continuum of contemporary 4E research on attention, such as recent enactivist accounts of how an agent’s sensorimotor coupling with music fosters emergent emotional scaffolding. This would clarify whether the state you depict is truly novel or rather a nuanced form of distributed attention akin to Herbert’s conceptions of “openness” in musical absorption.

Furthermore, in your discussion of how shared embodiment and emotional resonance contribute to listening experiences, you might bring in new phenomenology’s explorations of atmospheres (e.g., Hermann Schmitz) or Böhme’s aesthetic of “presence,” where the very medium of sound creates a felt co-presence that modifies bodily tonality and sense of space. This would show more precisely how the “we-ness” of concert listening stretches beyond discrete individual minds to a collectively lived and felt environment. Your reflections on nostalgia, historical memory, and national identity in certain pieces also suggest potential resonance with post-Husserlian thinkers such as Jan Patočka or Jean-Luc Marion, whose work on the event-character of artworks might deepen your account of how meaning is “given” anew in performance. By framing “mind surfing” as an interplay of heightened analytical focus, emotional transport, and intersubjective immersion—and by weaving in these additional strands of contemporary phenomenological thought—the paper would emerge as not only an empirical study but also a clear theoretical intervention in debates on music, consciousness, and shared affective life. 

Author Response

Reviewer 3:

First of all, I want to commend you on an impressively written and thought-provoking manuscript. Your arguments are clearly articulated with illustrative case studies and make a strong contribution to the study of musical absorption and phenomenology. The following suggestions represent potential avenues for theoretical expansion and may be adopted at your discretion, depending on the article’s goals and your overall plans:

One clear opportunity arises around the question of agency and passivity in absorption: you draw on Husserl’s passive synthesis and Gallagher’s minimal self distinctions, but you could develop these further by, for instance, engaging with Michel Henry’s account of affectivity or Bernhard Waldenfels’ analyses of responsive experience. Such perspectives might illuminate the felt transformation of self-awareness during musical absorption—the paper consistently treats absorption as either immersion or ex-stasis, but Henry’s emphasis on self-affection could help explain how that shift in “I can” (and the related sense of being moved) arises from the interior pathos of consciousness rather than an externally “given” phenomenon alone.

Likewise, the references to Genuisas’ synthesis of aesthetic and spiritual absorption suggest room to connect your “mind surfing” paradigm with discussions on whether these experiences expand the self’s intentional horizons or, conversely, dissolve them in non-reflective flow. Although you rightly touch on Krueger’s and Clarke’s ecological/enactivist ideas, you could intensify the paper’s philosophical heft by more explicitly situating “mind surfing” within a continuum of contemporary 4E research on attention, such as recent enactivist accounts of how an agent’s sensorimotor coupling with music fosters emergent emotional scaffolding. This would clarify whether the state you depict is truly novel or rather a nuanced form of distributed attention akin to Herbert’s conceptions of “openness” in musical absorption.

Furthermore, in your discussion of how shared embodiment and emotional resonance contribute to listening experiences, you might bring in new phenomenology’s explorations of atmospheres (e.g., Hermann Schmitz) or Böhme’s aesthetic of “presence,” where the very medium of sound creates a felt co-presence that modifies bodily tonality and sense of space. This would show more precisely how the “we-ness” of concert listening stretches beyond discrete individual minds to a collectively lived and felt environment. Your reflections on nostalgia, historical memory, and national identity in certain pieces also suggest potential resonance with post-Husserlian thinkers such as Jan Patočka or Jean-Luc Marion, whose work on the event-character of artworks might deepen your account of how meaning is “given” anew in performance. By framing “mind surfing” as an interplay of heightened analytical focus, emotional transport, and intersubjective immersion—and by weaving in these additional strands of contemporary phenomenological thought—the paper would emerge as not only an empirical study but also a clear theoretical intervention in debates on music, consciousness, and shared affective life. 

 

Dear reviewer,

Thank you so much for this positive and encouraging evaluation. We take your praise very much to heart and appreciate you thinking along the paper suggesting alternative perspectives (Henry and Waldenfels) and the further exploration of the existing one’s (more on mind surfing, as well as Schmitz, Bohme, Patocka and Marion).

These are weighty ideas that could as well replace the theoretical framework we’ve used and it’d be fascinating to see how an analysis of the same data with these different theoretical perspectives would pan out. One other reviewer also mentioned the perspective of “atmospheres”. We will accredit you with most of these perspectives that we briefly mention on page in footnote 1 on page 4. We suppose that we all agree that there isn’t room in the current paper (which is already above word limit) to properly address them. We’re very tempted to pursue “not only an empirical study but also a clear theoretical intervention in debates on music, consciousness, and shared affective life”, but think that this properly belongs in a less empirical paper (or a chapter in a monograph) that doesn’t need to spend time presenting methodology and data-analysis. We’d be delighted if you’d reach out upon publication of this article, such that we could share ideas of how to best structure and position such work.

For whatever it might be worth, we will be generating a new data set later this spring with non-performing listeners, to finalize the empirical move from expert performers to listening, adept performers, to non-performing listeners. Here, we hope to be able to address some of the valuable ideas you mention (and catch up on the reading). Further, one of us is planning on a monograph with a chapter on this data-set. Here, it would also be apt to use Henry, Schmitz and Waldenfels.

Thank you so much.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for your effort in revising the manuscript, which looks much improved to my eyes.

Final issues: 

Leman's name is Marc, not Mark. 

Many commas are missing from added references.