**1. Introduction**

Music has a great capacity for eliciting spiritual experiences. We see this in the ubiquitous use of music in religion, in the transcendentalism of the Romantic period with great works of Art such as Liszt's Transcendental Studies [1], and in Robert Schumann's description of music as a universal language that animates the spirit [2]. There is something about music that makes it an effective vehicle for the expression of an ultimate reality that we can call spirituality [3–8]. Research on emotion in music over the last 20 years has led to an increasingly sophisticated understanding, culminating with perhaps one of the most important presentations of its mechanisms, through the work of Juslin and Västfjäll [9]. The mechanisms they propose can be grouped in a way that was proposed by Meyer [10] a half a century earlier, with a distinction between *referentialism* (extrinsic, e.g., Juslin and Västfjäll's "episodic memory") and *absolutism* (intrinsic, e.g., "emotional contagion"). That is, for at least the last 50 years, music in emotion researchers have been able to conceptualise emotion as having its source *extrinsic* to the music (memories, imaginings, *etc*.) or *intrinsic* to the music (coming from within the structure of the music). However, little work has been conducted to see if spiritual experiences can similarly be classed as intrinsic or extrinsic to the music. Are they of the same kind as the music, so that the music embodies the spiritual? Or are they of a different kind,

so that the music simply designates the spiritual? That is the research question this study seeks to explore. We begin by demonstrating that several researchers are aware of this possible dichotomy, but we identify little research that directly addresses the question from an empirical perspective, and so a survey-based study is reported to address the question.

There is debate amongst the research community as to what exactly spirituality means [11–13]. Rather than try and solve that debate in this paper we note that it is recognized as being closely related to transcendence [14–16]. For example, Kennedy and Kanthamani suggested that both transcendence and spirituality encompass an "overwhelming feeling of peace and unity with the entire creation, or profound inner sense of Divine presence" ([17], p. 334). Therefore, we can compare spiritual and transcendent experiences to see whether music conveys them intrinsically or extrinsically.

They will be intrinsic to the music if they are *embodied* by the music; if, for example, the sense of transcending beyond this physical world and losing track of time and space is inherent in the perception and reception of the melody, harmony and rhythm of the music itself. Meyer [10] called this *absolute* meaning. Absolute meaning is contained within the music itself, arising from some natural signification that the music possesses. Davies [18] called this the *dynamic characteristic in appearance,* where music models the spiritual experience through its pitch, rhythm and dynamics. Just as a Bassett Hound *looks* sad, so music has the dynamic characteristics that match the spiritual experience.

Accordingly, spiritual experiences will be embodied by the musical forms and not simply mediated through them, so that those forms can be done away with. Harvey called this *integration*, claiming that spirituality is in the very nature of music's working: "The music is neither an abstraction nor an outer object but an inner coming-to-life of something" ([19], p. 32). Therefore, "music is by its very nature spiritual" (p. 82). To the extent that this is the case, spiritual experiences will be intrinsic to the music.

The alternative is that spiritual experiences are extrinsic to the music, if they are simply designated to the music through association. This is what John Booth Davies [20] meant by the expression "Darling, they're playing our song". It is an intentionality that is merely *lent* to the music, which the music does not, of itself, possess [21]. A particular song may, for example, come to represent one's connection with God even if it does not inherently possess that intentionality. This is what Meyer [10] classified as *referential* meaning because the music merely refers to something outside the music. While Meyer focused on thoughts and, in particular, emotions, we are proposing that this provides a way of understanding spiritual experiences in music.

This extrinsic association can happen either with the music itself or with the text, which is part of the music in a wider sense. This research includes the possibility of the latter because of the close association between music and text. Various studies have shown this connection [22–24], which became known as the "integration effect" [25]. More recent studies have found that language in music (text) appears to be qualitatively different from language on its own [26]. Therefore, we will include the possibility of spiritual experiences arising from music and text together.

Music has a great capacity for sustaining such extrinsic references. It can trigger images or thoughts of people, places and experiences that are spiritual in nature, especially in the religious context. It can also carry connotations or shared associations that are spiritual in nature, such as in an African freedom song. Further, music can convey moods that are spiritual. This was evident in Gabrielsson and Lindström Wik's [27] existential and transcendence categories, such as "*heavenly/extraterrestrial feeling*", "*oceanic feelings*", "*spiritual peace/harmony*", and "*devout, sacred atmosphere*".

Research on emotion as an experience of music has demonstrated that emotion can be both extrinsic, through its propensity to attract and maintain extra-musical references, and intrinsic, derived from the structure of the music itself, emanating from its forms. This was the focus of Meyer's seminal work *Emotion and meaning in music* [10], which is still bearing influence today [9,28–30]. Yet Davies [18] is one who claims that while music can have external references as it operates as a code, the power of music does not seem to depend on those codes, so emotion is better accounted for as an intrinsic phenomenon.

In our previous paper [31] we found that spiritual experiences operate in a similar way to emotion. However, that paper was limited to qualitative responses to open-ended questions about spiritual experiences identified in response to personally significant musical experiences. This paper examines, via quantitative techniques, whether spiritual experiences are reported as being intrinsic to the music and therefore embodied by it, or extrinsic to the music and therefore referred to by it, with the music acting as a conduit or link to this spiritual experience.

The study deliberately limits the participants to religious people because we wanted to be sure that a range of spiritual experiences could be reported, including those of a connection with the supernatural. Participants were drawn from the Christian religion (see Participants section, below). However, to safeguard against the possibility that participants will provide spiritual responses *because* they believe the researchers are seeking information about religious context experience (which we were not, we were seeking information on spiritual experiences) comparisons of experiences from the religious and the non-religious contexts were employed.

Music does not operate in what Sloboda [32] called a pharmaceutical way, by constraining a certain experience regardless of context and listener factors (personality, mood, *etc*.). It is, at least partially, a cultural phenomenon, whose meaning is developed within a cultural frame [33]. The community will respond to the music with a pre-given comportment to listening that includes attitudes, beliefs, expectations, and behaviors [34]. This influence of culture was examined here by comparing experiences in religious and non-religious contexts. If the spiritual experience is simply a demand characteristic of the religious context, it should not be present in the non-religious context. Furthermore, a demand characteristic should lead to lower ratings in the non-religious context, but in that case the differential responses to the different items related to spirituality will still be able to inform relative differences between contexts. In light of the contemporary understanding of spirituality as distinct from and wider than religion [12,13,35], we expect that experiences in the religious contexts will be more extrinsic in nature, involving references to the supernatural, but we expect that the overall spiritual experience will not simply be an effect of context.

This study has two aims:


## **2. Method**
