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The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music
Jonathan De Souza (ed.) et al.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197577844.001.0001
Published: 2023 Online ISBN: 9780197577875 Print ISBN: 9780197577844
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CHAPTER
Expanding Phenomenological Methods: Musical Absorption

in Concert 
Simon Hø ding
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197577844.013.6 Pages C6S1–C6N71

Published: 18 July 2023
Abstract
This chapter argues that musicking and musical absorption constitute a ripe eld for
phenomenological investigations because such musical activity engages a number of intertwined
bodily, a ective, and cognitive capacities, such as di erent forms of memory, attention, re ection and
meta-cognition, imagination, mind wandering, and empathy. These capacities, in turn, connect back
to core discussions in orthodox phenomenological philosophy. From here, the chapter ventures into a
presentation of using qualitative, “phenomenological interviews” for enlightening the
phenomenology of musical absorption while critically engaging with core insights in debates on
expertise and the psychology of music. Finally, the chapter expands to include insights from
physiological and psychological experimental science proposing how one could structure “research
concerts” that integrate phenomenological, qualitative, and quantitative traditions into live citizen
science events.
Keywords: phenomenology, musical absorption, expertise, musical communication, phenomenological

interviews, phenomenological mixed methods
Subject: Musicology and Music History, Philosophy of Music, Music
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
Introduction
1
Musicking, the activity of engaging with music, usually in listening or playing, is a perfect site for
phenomenological investigations. Listening to—but perhaps even more clearly, playing and performing—
music engages a number of intertwined bodily, a ective, and cognitive capacities, such as di erent forms of
memory, attention, re ection and meta-cognition, imagination and mind wandering, and empathy. And it
touches on a number of phenomenological core-themes such as perception, a ectivity, self-awareness,
embodiment, and the sense of agency, as well as intersubjectivity, inter-a ectivity, or inter-corporeity.
In this chapter, I argue that to access this treasure chest of musical experience, we better supplement
orthodox phenomenological methods with qualitative and even quantitative investigations. Surely, Husserl
2
illustrates his analysis of internal time consciousness with a melody. Surely, Merleau-Ponty’s example
with the organist’s sense of the organization of his instrument teaches us a lesson about the structure of
3
perception. And surely, Schutz, in spite of his (to us) disappointing claim that he is “not concerned with a
4
phenomenology of musical experience,” o ers interesting insights about the possibility of an inter-
5
corporeal, musical “We.” But the orthodox heritage from the founding phenomenologists such as Husserl,
Stein, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger is a philosophical one advancing primarily through the realm of

possibility of one’s own thinking and experience. For most of us, our acquaintance with music is through
our own listening experience, and while it, as lived experience, is fascinating, it does not necessarily
produce equally fascinating analytic results. In order to bring musical experience to bear on the above-
mentioned phenomenological core-themes, we need methods to involve other people’s experience of and
possibly even physiological responses to playing or listening to music.
Fortunately, phenomenology is well poised to integrate with such methods. It was, indeed, Merleau-Ponty
6
who used the pathological case of the soldier Schneider’s head injury to teach us about the body schema. In
the parallel realm of phenomenological psychopathology, scholars such as Jasper, Minkowski, and Bleuler
have e ectively combined their empirical cases of people with schizophrenia with the study of
phenomenology. More recently, Varela, Rosch, and Thompson’s “Embodied Mind” (1991) combined
phenomenology with the cognitive sciences, a trend that has only accelerated in the phenomenological
community, evidenced in the high-ranking philosophical journal Phenomenology and Cognitive Science and
7 8
in the theoretical advances made in enactivism or so-called 4E cognition. It is within this trend that I
situate our discussion of this chapter.
To access the experiences of others with regard to musicking, we need a qualitative interview methodology.
This methodology can in turn further inform quantitative or experimental methods, especially from
psychology. What I describe in this chapter is rst how to use qualitative interviews to bear on
phenomenological insights about musicking. This will be the bulk of the chapter. Finishing this
presentation, I will show how quantitative methods can be added to assist our phenomenological analysis.
For example, intense musical absorption is a curious experience seemingly involving both “really being
there” and “not being there at all.” This might be construed as a unique intertwinement of heightened
attention and mind wandering, and here pupillometry—the science of the size and directedness of our
pupils—can help us advance further. Also, joint absorption, the feeling of being together in the music, is a
fascinating and equally sophisticated experience, seemingly involving several di erent ways of being
together. Here heart-rate synchronization studies can help us understand the embodied foundations of
musical being together.
The Phenomenological Interview
If we want to understand how musicking engages our consciousness, we can of course analyze our
experience of listening to music and, for instance, try to discern the quality and meaning of being carried
away by or absorbed in the music. But would it not, prima facie¸ be better to engage people who are steeped
in musicking, such as professional musicians? Not only are they more acquainted with musicking through
the sheer number of hours spent practicing, but they also know what it takes to produce music and have a
technical vocabulary for this process. They can potentially give clearer and more detailed descriptions—a

fundamental desideratum in all phenomenology. But, unless we are professional musicians, this train of
thought now leads us to the conclusion that we must leave orthodox phenomenology and gain knowledge by
eliciting these descriptions from another. Fortunately, ethnography, anthropology, and psychology—all
using interviews—have been doing this for decades. There are several interview methods all claiming to be
9
phenomenological, and there is plenty of heated discussion about which one is better. It is not evident to
10 11
me that the discussions among some of the protagonists here, such as Max Van Manen, Amadeo Giorgi,
12 13
Jonathan Smith, and also Claire Petitmengin, have always been as fruitful as they could have been.
14
Together with Kristian Martiny and Katrin Heimann, I have argued that, rather than discussing which
method is truly phenomenological, it might be best to identify if a particular eld of investigation is better
suited to a particular method.
15
What Kristian Martiny and I coined a “framework for a phenomenological interview” is particularly well-
16
suited for so-called extreme cases. These cases can come from various kinds of pathology such as Cerebral
17 18 19
palsy or Moebius Syndrome, or various kinds of expert practices. What unites these two groups is that
certain aspects of their embodied consciousness are so altered from a more normally functioning one that
they can show us something we could not see before. Building on the phenomenological tradition from
Husserl and Scheler, Joel Krueger, for instance, argues against the idea established in mainstream
20
psychology that to know others, we read their minds. In contradistinction, he defends “direct perception”:
nothing is hidden and needs to be read or deciphered because we are normally “seeing [others’] minds in
21
action,” in people’s gestures and comportment. In contrast, some people with Moebius Syndrome,
because of their facial paralysis, cannot to the same extent see others’ minds in action and have to
compensate by guessing or reading others’ intentions. In other words, Krueger uses Moebius Syndrome as
an extreme case, to show us something about consciousness we could not see before, namely what it is like
to have to read other peoples’ minds. In Husserlian phenomenology, we can use our imagination to perform
22
an “eidetic variation” and thus distinguish accidental from necessary aspects of a phenomenon. With
23
extreme cases, we can use this idea to perform what Froese and Gallagher call a “factual variation.” Using
Krueger’s analysis, Moebius Syndrome is a factual variation of our normal empathic capacity, showing that
mind-reading, though something we sometimes explicitly do, is not a necessary constituent of the
phenomenon or mental capacity.
Another way of phrasing the analytic strength of the phenomenological interview advocated for here is that
it is particularly e cient in challenging, or even disproving, general theories or ideas claiming universal
application. In this chapter, I focus on two such theories: one from the so-called expertise debate taking
place among phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and even sports psychology—the other continuing the
theoretical tenet of Krueger’s argument about what empathic capacities musicians need to play together.
Thinking and Coping
Hubert Dreyfus has made great contributions to philosophy, applying the work of Heidegger and Merleau-
Ponty to help us understand the capacities (or lack of capacities) of AI, Air Force pilots, chess players, and
other experts. Building on orthodox phenomenological discussion of re ection and embodied thinking, or
motor intentionality, he engaged John McDowell in an important discussion about the role of rationality
24
and reasoning in action. Dreyfus uses expert cases to argue that when acting, one cannot at the same time
re ect—at least not without degrading performance. While there is a lot of prima facie evidence in favor of

this position—just think about situations of “overthinking” a simple action and consequently choking—
systematic empirical investigations of various domains of expertise, such as playing music, cricket, or
25
mountain biking, show that things are more complex. In philosophy, cognitive science, and sports
26
psychology, the issue of the relation between re ection and coping has spurred a rich debate.
To return to our methodological tool of the extreme case, the task at hand is the following: if Dreyfus claims
27
that “there is no place in the phenomenon of fully absorbed coping for intentional content,” that while
28 29
coping one is “mindless” or like a “sleepwalker” “on auto-pilot,” then nding one example of an expert
actively thinking, re ecting, planning, imagining, in short, engaging intentional content while coping
without impairing performance will expose Dreyfus’ idea as fallacious. To prepare the conceptual ground a
bit further for the interview data about to appear, let me mention that to Dreyfus, the opposite of absorbed
30
coping is a conceptual rationality working as a “detached observer” with a marked detachment between
subject and object.
Here is a quotation from the violist in the Danish String Quartet (DSQ) that I have used often to portray the
phenomenology of absorption in music. In the following, Asbjørn Nørgaard is talking about a particularly
pleasant and absorbed form of performative mentality:
You are both less conscious and a lot more conscious I think. Because I still think that if you’re in
the zone, then I know how I’m sitting on the chair, I know if my knees are locked, I know if I am
exing my thigh muscle, I know if my shoulders are lifted, I know if my eyes are strained, I know
who is sitting on the rst row, I know more or less what they are doing, but it is somewhat more,
like disinterested, neutrally registering, I am not like inside, I am not kind of a part of the set-up, I
31
am just looking at it, while I’m in the zone.
This description comes from an international master violist, describing one of his most enjoyable moments
of performing. It characterizes a clear, detail-oriented, free, observing kind of intentionality at great
freedom to do as it pleases. It certainly does not mark a degraded performance. However, in Dreyfus’ terms,
it looks like a description of the rational “detached observer,” which is supposed to be incompatible with
and degrading to absorbed coping. Dreyfus and Nørgaard cannot both be right. Given a methodological
justi cation for the reliability and validity of the interview data, it seems reasonable to go with the empirical
data over and above Dreyfus’ idea of expertise. This justi cation will follow shortly. For now, this ends the
32
rst example of how an interview-based insight can inform an ongoing philosophical discussion.
Putting Oneself in the Other Personʼs (Musical) Shoes
The next example uses the same structure of nding an idea or theory with putative universal application
and nding a strong counter-example in one’s data. We now shift the focus from the individual musician to
the empathic processes enabling ensemble playing or musical communication. This is a popular topic in
much psychology of music experimenting with joint action. Some of it starts from the very same
supposition that Krueger and Gallagher oppose from their phenomenological perspective, namely that in
order to understand others, we read their minds or “put ourselves in their shoes.” The latter expression is

often used in so-called simulation theory, which used to be the go-to explanation for the functioning of
33
mirror-neurons. In psychology of music, simulation theory spills over to the claim that in order to play
34
well together: “musicians must decentre and see things from other musicians’ musical points of view” or
that “shared musical representations ensure that ensemble musicians take each other’s actions into
35
account during performance.” From here, the “exceptional case” strategy is the same: if we can nd one
example of good joint performance that occurs without seeing things from other musicians’ points of view
or without shared representations, then we have shown that it is indeed possible to perform well together
36
without relying on such relatively sophisticated, high-level mental capacities. In chapter 11 of my book, I
provide a number of examples that on the musical application of simulation theory should lead to inferior
performance because they lack the necessary shared representations and simulation. Before mentioning a
few of these, it is worth remembering one astonishing fact. Even as an experienced listener and concert-
goer, it is almost impossible to perceive what performing musicians are experiencing. One attends a awless
concert, only to learn, in a subsequent interview, that the musicians were perhaps struggling, in pain,
covering for one another, or absorbed with no sense of time and place. Also, the cues of smiles, winks, and
blinks one often perceives from the audience perspective can be deceptive, an act of showmanship, rather
than instantiating important communicative acts. The DSQ violist calls this “the huckster method” and, like
the rest of his quartet, nds that the most intimate and meaningful communication takes place without
visual contact, through the ears.
Based on the approximately seventeen hours of qualitative interviews I have conducted with the DSQ
members, I have constructed a “topography of musical absorption,” delineating various classes of
experiences one can undergo while practicing and performing. One of the most fascinating, I call “absorbed
not-being-there.” It is a rare kind of experience from which the musicians report very pleasant feelings and
sensations but also a near complete lack of episodic memory. They seemingly enter into what one would be
37
tempted to call a trance-like state, in which there is no reportable thinking or perception. In the quartet
setting, this is more likely to occur for the rst violinist, who can be more at liberty to “ y out,” inspired or
taken away by the melodic lead. In sophisticated pieces such as the late Beethoven quartets, however, the
melodic contour is shared. This music seems particularly absorptive and cannot be reduced to the lead
“ ying out” with the rest following. When a musician is absorbed in this way, he is not paying attention to
what the others are doing, he is not seeing things from the other musicians’ points of view. Yet, these
experiences also seemingly occur when the musicians feel their best and safest, namely, at the highest level
of performance. In other words, the existence of “absorbed-not-being there” in expert performance seems
to disprove the claim that musicians must decenter and see things from their colleagues’ point of view.
Another example speaks more directly to the claim of shared representations. Sometimes accidents happen
on stage. Pages fail to turn, shoulders ache, strings snap, and so on. If possible, the musicians will keep
playing and conceal these mishaps. They sometimes do this so well as to even conceal it from one another.
In one instance, playing Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, the second violinist’s iPad with the score froze. He
had to focus on trying to remember what to play. The rst violinist and viola player perceived the issue and
intermittently tried to help to get the iPad going whenever they had a break. And apparently, the cellist did
38
not notice much. So here you have at least three distinct experiences unfolding: (1) the rst violinist and
violist, shifting between playing from their score and leaning over to help x an iPad; (2) the second
violinist trying to remember his score and xing his iPad; (3) the cellist absorbed in his playing seemingly
unaware of all of this. This performance was perhaps not optimal, but on the other hand, it also did not
su er to the extent that the DSQ stopped to x the problem. In other words, here is an example of a
performance successfully proceeding without shared representations. Without recourse to shared
representations or simulation, one might ask how musicians then manage to play together. Answering this
39
requires a longer positive account, which I have provided elsewhere. But for present purposes, we again
see how the phenomenological case study of musical expertise can advance fundamental theoretical work in
phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and psychology. We should not infer sophisticated, high-level

cognitive capacities from the display of sophisticated musical interaction. A shared, bodily intentionality, or
40
inter-a ectivity, can lift much of the burden of explanation. And if simulation and shared representations
are not strictly necessary for expert joint action, they may also not be for less sophisticated everyday joint
action. This line of argument would in turn bolster embodied and enactive accounts of cognition over and
41
against representational ones.
Interview Pragmatics
So far, these examples have provided the results of phenomenologically enhanced, qualitative, interview-
based investigations with expert musicians. While this chapter does not provide a manual for this
methodological frame, it is apposite to mention a few rules of thumb to give an insight into the process
behind these results.
The methodological frame for this interview format is a combination of ethnographically informed,
qualitative, semi-structured interviews and phenomenological research. In other words, the “interview”
part of a “phenomenological interview” is not explicitly phenomenological but adheres to scienti c
standards from qualitative research. Phenomenological research questions about coping and re ection or
about joint action are theoretical questions. Expecting interview subjects to be able to answer our theoretical
questions is a grave mistake. It is a mistake not least because what you as a phenomenologist are out to
understand is not just another subject’s experience of a particular instance, but the structure of that
42
experience. A structure here refers to an essential characteristic, like the one you get through the
aforementioned eidetic or factual variation. This aim for structure places you in an epistemic double-blind
situation— rstly because you do not know the interviewee’s experience, and secondly because the
interviewee usually does not know anything about its invariant structures. To grasp these structures, and
get out of the double blind, you need a two-tiered process, rst getting access to the other’s rst-person
43
perspective through your own second-person perspective, and second analyzing it, such that it discloses
something structural.
The raw material to be produced with the interviewee in the rst tier is detailed descriptions of practice.
Subsequently, in the second tier, it is the responsibility of the researcher to analyze or interpret these
descriptions according to theoretically interesting points. She must have some mastery of adjacent elds
such as phenomenology, psychology, or cognitive science, such that the interview analyses can be brought
to bear on relevant, scienti c discussions. The rst tier is the physical interview aiming to co-generate rich
descriptions of practice and has a relatively limited temporal frame, though it can easily go on for an hour.
The second tier is the analysis and interpretation of that interview. In the most straightforward sense, it
begins with the transcription, then goes through several close readings, then coding, categorization, or
clustering of the interview content, then analyses of the meaning of the greater whole and nally
interpretation through the grander perspective of relevant theory. Tier two, however, can also be said to
start before tier one, in the formulation of a research interest, manifested in an interview guide to steer the
interview. Finally, the two tiers circle back on each other, and both can be reiterated to achieve greater
clarity and a sense of saturation, so that the interview makes sense in light of the theoretical or conceptual
framework achieved.
The cardinal theoretical point for tier one is that the interview is co-generated. One is not digging
knowledge out of the head of one’s interviewee, but partakes in the knowledge production through one’s
listening, questions, gestures, and so forth. By taking up an empathetic listening attitude, one is rst and
44
foremost engaging another human being, another meaning-making subject who simultaneously and
45
reciprocally is engaging oneself. As a consequence hereof, one cannot obtain static, strictly reproducible
information through the interview itself. The interview is a distinct second-person method with its distinct
46
criteria of, and positions on, validity and reliability.

The second tier can take a number of shapes. One of the ideas of labeling the “phenomenological interview”
a “framework” was exactly that di erent approaches to analysis can serve di erent functions at di erent
times. Hence, one can employ di erent techniques for transcribing, reading, clustering, coding,
categorizing, analyzing, and nally theoretically contextualizing the interview. In keeping with Ravn’s
47
work, however, it is advantageous to think of an “emic” and “etic” analysis. The emic analyzes the
interview relative to endogenous concepts found in the actual interview, from the bottom up. The etic
proceeds from relevant concepts found in the literature to assess what the interview might have to say about
this concept, such as “coping vs. re ection” or “joint action” as exempli ed in this chapter. If one omits the
emic perspective, one misses the analytic potential of the interview material, namely to discover something
new. Inversely, if one fails to take the etic perspective into consideration, one’s e orts will have no bearing
on wider theory and will fail to contribute to the scienti c community. To give an example from the
“thinking and coping” discussion, I did not directly ask the DSQ members whether re ection would degrade
their coping during performance. Rather, as I was asking for detailed descriptions of past performance, the
violinist Frederik Øland said the following, referring to a performance of Bach’s famous Chaconne for solo
violin:
I could play it very well, but was afraid that I couldn’t remember it and that I would fall out. I made
(mental) mindmaps, posts-its. In the end this (mental) wall was completely yellow of all those
notes, that were locking my play. So, at a concert, I don’t know how it came to mind, every time I
came to a problem or one of those passages where I thought I couldn’t remember it, I would think:
“Now, I am going to try something completely di erent.” The rst that came to mind:
Roadrunner, “meeeepmeeeep.” Thinking of the wolf that blew itself up. Doing this was the best
48
performance of the Giaconna I ever gave.
Consciously thinking about the Looney Tunes Roadrunner cartoon during a performance as a strategic
response to meeting challenging passages constitutes an instance of re ection, meta-awareness, and
planning. The emic category for this passage would appropriately be “playing while challenged” and
“thinking/strategizing while playing” because the utterance concerns how to handle a challenging
performance situation. The etic analysis, however, is informed by knowledge of the “thinking and coping”
discussion and applies the emic analysis to this discussion, providing evidence of the compatibility of the
two.
49
The two tiers feed into each other. The rst tier provides the discursive and tacit information for the
second tier, and tier two guides one’s questioning during the interview. Tier two can also encompass the
writing and presentation of drafts and papers. Sometimes, one discovers holes in one’s interpretation or
comes upon questions that the interview cannot answer. Thus, one sometimes must return and make
another interview to clear up matters, by generating more detailed descriptions in the rst tier.
So far, this chapter has given examples of a way to combine phenomenology and qualitative research
methods, in the form of “phenomenological interviews,” as a way to advance research in phenomenology
down alternative paths. This combination needs not concern only musicking or even artistic practices, but
can be e ectively applied to any expert practice, whether it be martial arts or surgery. But because
musicking integrates so many core themes from phenomenology and engages so many embodied conscious
functions, it o ers almost in nite avenues of inquiry. As hopefully demonstrated, this combination can in
itself contribute to phenomenology and related disciplines. If one, however, is more inclined to also pursue
the experimental cognitive sciences, the phenomenological interview can be taken even further.
Expanding the Phenomenological Interview
Absorbed musical experience can be very hard to put into words, no matter the skill of interviewee and

interviewer. On its own, the phenomenological interview has several shortcomings in understanding the
embodied foundations of singular and joint absorption. For instance, without an audiovisual prompt it is
di cult for the interview to obtain high temporal precision: it is di cult for the musician to match a certain
experience with a passage or even bar in the music played. If one is interested in obtaining such precision,
for instance because one wanted to couple it with a physiological measure, one would need methods
transcending the interview. In the following, I am going to present two such methodological combinations
that can enhance the phenomenological interview. Both of these continue the inquiry into “thinking and
coping” and joint absorption initially presented. They are also examples of what Gallagher calls a
50
“phenomenologically frontloaded” set-up. For our context, Gallagher’s term means at least two things.
Firstly, it means the phenomenological discussions and concepts are retained as grounding an experimental
investigation. For instance, from the discussion with simulation theory, we found that the DSQ has several
distinct ways of communication. Instead of assuming that they communicate by putting themselves into
each other’s musical shoes, we maintain that there are important conceptual distinctions between various
modes of communication and test whether there might be physiologically corresponding di erences.
Secondly, a phenomenological front-loading necessitates a prior extensive interview-based investigation,
because it is this investigation with its requisite analysis that brings to light the relevant invariant
structures and etic concepts to investigate. Without a prior, contextually based knowledge of the praxis
under investigation, one would be experimentally blindfolded. In other words, the experimentally expanded
methods to be suggested here are exactly that: expansions of the foundational work that happens in classical,
orthodox phenomenological investigations as further applied to various kinds of musicking practices
through the interview procedure.
Making reference to expanded phenomenological methods through Gallagher is also to emphasize the
connection between phenomenology and embodied cognitive science or enactivism. The role of the body
51
and movement in consciousness is central to the phenomenological fathers such as Husserl and of course
52
Merleau-Ponty, and it is through their analysis that we are inspired to understand how the body shapes the
53
mind. This question also inspired neuro-phenomenological investigations in Varela’s, Thompson’s, and
54
Rosch’s groundbreaking work. Here, interviews with or questioning of Buddhist monks was essential in
trying to couple conscious and neuro-biological functions. No matter how much we excel in our
phenomenological analyses or interview techniques, most of the physiological goings-on in our bodies
evade our conscious discernment. Therefore, if we wish to couple phenomenology with physiological
examinations of the body, we need various kinds of technological enhancements or expansions.
Musical Communication and Heart-Rate Synchronization
Over the last decade or so, there is increasing evidence that our heart rate is in uenced by our social
relations and actions. Several studies show that choir singers greatly synchronize their heart rate while
55 56
singing, and with a re-walking ceremony, Konvalinka et al. demonstrated that the onlookers’ heart
rate is co-determined by the social relation they bear with the rewalker: roughly speaking, when the
rewalker steps out on the coals, family members’ heart rates also spike, while the change in the heart rate
of random strangers is much smaller. For our context, the interesting question to pursue here is whether

heart-rate synchronization serves some kind of communicative function in joint musicking, working
beneath and assisting conscious interaction. Could it be that musicians can play impeccably together
without being aware of one another, as demonstrated with the Verklärte Nacht example, partially because
their synchronized heart rates subconsciously handle some aspect of rhythm and coordination? Besides an
57
extended and shared, movement-based “body schema,” could it be that the pulse and variations in our
58
heart rate are shared, thus linking our bodies? Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “Intercorporeity,” through
which we inhabit the other’s body at a pre-re ective level, gives us some theoretical impetus to pursue the
question. And so do various DSQ utterances about the experience of playing together. According to violinist
Rune Sørensen, some of the most di cult joint play is playing very long notes and making the bow-shift at
exactly the same time. Being able to do so is best achieved through closing one’s eyes and relying on an
a ective state of “trust”:
But I also enormously enjoy closing my eyes, even if we play very slowly and then trust that the
other … that we follow one another, feel the energy, here we shift the bowing, that it does not
59
become a thing of vision, but that you can sense it, there is the bow-shift, right?
I here italicized the “here” and “there” because Rune in the interview emphasized these words while
60
pretending to move the bow. It requires more explication than I can provide here, but Rune indicates that
he can feel the other DSQ members through his own bow-movement, making the notion of “moving as
one” all the more concrete. But can you really rhythmically feel the other’s movement in your own body and
a ectively use that to guide your joint musicking? While I do believe this is a likely etic interpretation of
Rune’s utterance and while I believe that such trust-based musical communication constitutes a heightened
61
and rare inter-kinesthetic a ective form of joint absorption or “we-intentionality,” it is also clear that
the evidence could be bolstered through a more experimental approach. Here we would be testing some
form of the hypothesis that inter-a ective, trust-based joint absorption would correlate with a higher
degree of heart-rate synchronization. Experimentally, this could be achieved by following an ensemble on
various concerts, tracing their heart rate while performing, subsequently interviewing with a focus on
strong experiences of playing together. You would then look for correlations between heart-rate
synchronization and experiences of intense joint absorption, preferably with a more micro-temporally
sensitive rating system to mediate the experiential, descriptive data and the physiological, beats-per-
minute data. A procedure for this is described in an article co-authored with Kristian Martiny and Juan
62
Toro. While this approach has a high degree of ecological validity, it is di cult to obtain high reliability
because of two particular issues. Firstly, an ensemble like the DSQ rarely plays the same repertoire two
nights in a row, making it almost impossible to repeat one’s measurements. Secondly, the target,
heightened experience is rare. In other words, this proposed set-up does not meet the criteria of a high-
quality controlled experiment but is better suited for initial exploration. If one wanted a set up with higher
reliability in the form of reproducibility, one could have musicians play the same short musical passage a
number of times in di erent settings while tracing their heart rate. This is merely an example of how one
could proceed. In actual practice, designing such experiments based on front-loaded phenomenological
knowledge is intricate and requires a dedicated, interdisciplinary research team. Such a team can be found at
the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion. Here, after sustained e ort,
we managed to conduct such work, and for the rst time have an experimentally informed quantitative
63
correlation between heart rate synchronization and shared musical absorption.
Musical Absorption between Heightened Attention and Mind Wandering

While there is not much scienti c literature on absorption and while much of it is discussed under terms
such as “ ow” or “skilled coping,” a few scholars in psychology and ethnography have discussed
absorption in both music and literature with reference to related concepts such as “heightened attention”

and “mind wandering.” For instance, the psychologists Lange, Zweck, and Sinn state that musical
64
absorption fully engages the attentional apparatus in order to process the musical attentional object. They
65
further state that “absorption is highly related to … mind-wandering.” In music ethnography, we nd a
similar double identi cation in Herbert’s work on Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation, and
Trancing. She writes that musical trancing contains aspects of both “enhanced sensory awareness,”
“sharpened awareness and increased activation (alertness, arousal),” and “imagery, association, and
66
daydreaming.”
Given the assumption that intense musical absorption and musical trancing refer to the same experience, it
is paradoxical to associate such an experience with both heightened attention or sharpened awareness and
mind wandering or daydreaming because they are mutually exclusive: one cannot be intensely attending to
one’s musicking while mind-wandering about what one had for breakfast. In the aforementioned
67
“topography of musical absorption,” I have demonstrated that there are many di erent kinds of
absorption, some indeed characterized by mind wandering and others by heightened attention. Making
these more ne-grained distinctions could perhaps solve the paradoxical double identi cation. Musicking,
however, provides a strange kind of intentional object. It is constantly changing and does not reside in one
place. When a musician is highly attentive to the music, what exactly is she attentive to? The score, her
ngers, the sounds of the strings, the reverb of the hall, or perhaps a more imaginative object of where a
musical phrase is going? Further, from the DSQ, we know that expert musicians can strategically use their
imagination to change the quality and direction of their musicking. This pertains no less to freely
68
improvising musicians. Might it be that there is experiential room for absorbed states that are highly
attentive, yet simultaneously pervaded by imagination or even mind wandering?
If we wanted to gauge some of the subconscious bodily and neuro-physiological mechanisms subtending
intense musical absorption such as attention and mind wandering, we might turn to pupillometry.
Researchers since Kahneman have demonstrated tight coupling between pupil dilation on the one hand, and
69
mental e ort or arousal on the other. With more arousal or mental e ort, we get more dilated pupils. As
technology advances, almost normal-looking glasses can reliably trace pupil dilation, meaning that
musicians can play relatively undisturbed wearing such eye-tracking glasses. Just as we could couple
phenomenological categories to the physiological measure of heart-rate synchronization (in the case of
musical communication), we can here try to do the same, replacing heart-rate sensors with eye-tracking
70
glasses. The guiding hypothesis would be that less dilated pupils would correlate with mind wandering,
more than heightened attention. Again, one could go with higher ecological validity and do eye-tracking in
various concerts, linking the posterior interview concerning qualities of absorption, attention, and mind
wandering with pupil-dilation measures. Or one could go for higher reliability and have the musicians
perform di erent tasks related to these mental functions while measuring. Finally, one could do both. The
conclusions to such measurements coupled with phenomenological interviews could be expected to help us
resolve whether heightened attention and mind wandering really are mutually exclusive in musical
absorption, or whether hybrid experiences are indeed possible.
Conclusion: Phenomenology in Concert
Concluding this chapter, I want to point out that the interdisciplinary combinations—or phenomenological
expansions—mentioned here do not only serve to advance philosophy and science. They can also be used for
purposes of research politics and research communication. Philosophy generally is often considered a
“handmaiden” of science, and in larger funding applications, philosophers are sometimes considered add-
ons who provide an extraneous and critical angle. In the presented set-up, however, the phenomenologist
takes center stage. Based on her work and trust with the musicians, through the knowledge source of the

phenomenological interview, she is the one who can propose new hypotheses that require an
interdisciplinary research team to pursue. She becomes the research leader or PI who can enlist
experimental scientists to contribute to her project.
Even more exciting, because music is a life-a rming and immediately comprehensible activity that can
engage an entire audience of hundreds or thousands of non-academics, the phenomenologist can present
her ideas in concert. Musicians and audiences are often interested in scienti c and philosophical takes on
the magical experience of being a “we” together in the concert hall or the special kind of attention and
concentration harnessed during the performance. If the phenomenologist manages to win the trust of good
musicians and to collaborate with experimental scientists with, for instance, expertise in heart rate
synchronization or pupillometry, she can be allowed to transform the concert hall into a phenomenological
laboratory. While the musicians perform, the team of scientists collects physiological data. In the breaks,
she can present her ideas to the audience, engaging a large group outside normal academic reach, and after
the concert she can perform interviews or choose to call it a day and go for beers with her colleagues.
While all of this might sound overly grandiose and fantastic, the science concert suggested here, again, is
only a natural expansion of the phenomenological core interest in both ordinary and extraordinary
experience. We are all interested in understanding ourselves and our meaningful solo or shared experience.
Orthodox phenomenology, going “to the thing itself” and attempting to bracket theory and
presuppositions, is fundamentally well poised for this. Coupled with the right qualitative work,
phenomenology becomes a collaborative, second-person methodology that can share and nuance others’
experience. When this combination engages musicking—a fundamental human activity—everyone’s
attention is up for grabs. This gives the more interdisciplinary and experimentally oriented
phenomenologist a unique opportunity to put her own knowledge and abilities into play in the public
domain. I have provided an argument and presentation of how one can do this, investigating shared musical
experience and the distinctions between thinking and coping or heightened attention and mind wandering.
But several other phenomenological core-themes could also be addressed. Just think of emotions,
imagination, time-consciousness, empathy, and memory. With the expanded methodology outlined and
71
with continued technological development, we are ready for phenomenology in concert.
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Notes
1 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press,
1998).
2 Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington and London: Indiana University
Press, 1966).
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
4 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. 2: Studies in Social Theory (Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media, 1976), 159.
5 Ibid., 177.
6 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.
7 Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Evan Thompson,
Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Ezequiel
A. Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier E. Barandiaran, Sensorimotor Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
8 Albert Newen, Leon de Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, ed. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2018).
9 See Dan Zahavi, “Part III: Applied Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2018); Dan Zahavi,
“Getting It Quite Wrong: Van Manen and Smith on Phenomenology,” Qualitative Health Research 29, no. 6 (2019): 900–907.
10 Max Van Manen, “But Is It phenomenology?” Qualitative Health Research 27, no. 6 (2017): 775–779.
11 Amedeo Giorgi, “In Defense of Scientific Phenomenologies,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 51, no. 2 (2020):
135–161.
12 Jonathan A. Smith, “ʻYes It Is Phenomenologicalʼ: A Reply to Max Van Manenʼs Critique of Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis,” Qualitative Health Research 28, no. 12 (2018): 1955–1958.
13 Claire Petitmengin, “Enaction as a Lived Experience Towards a Radical Neurophenomenology,” Constructivist Foundations
11, no. 2 (2017): 138–147.
14 Katrin Heimann, Kristian Martiny, and Simon Hø ding, eds., “Working with Othersʼ Experience: Theory, Practice, and
Application,” special issue, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2023).
15 Simon Hø ding and Kristian Martiny, “Framing a Phenomenological Interview: What, Why and How,” Phenomenology and
the Cognitive Sciences 15 (2016): 539–564.
16 Bent Flyvbjerg, “Case Study,” in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 301–316; Susanne Ravn and Simon Hø ding, “The Promise of ʻSporting Bodiesʼ in
Phenomenological Thinking—How Exceptional Cases of Practice Can Contribute to Develop Foundational
Phenomenological Concepts,” Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 9 no. 1 (2017): 56–68.
17 Kristian Martiny, “How to Develop a Phenomenological Model of Disability,” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 18, no.
4 (2015): 553–565.

18 Joel Krueger, “Seeing Mind in Action,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 2 (2012): 149–173.
19 Ravn and Hø ding, “The Promise of ʻSporting Bodiesʼ in Phenomenological Thinking”; Susanne Ravn, “Integrating
Qualitative Research Methodologies and Phenomenology: Using Dancersʼ and Athletesʼ Experiences for
Phenomenological Analysis,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (2023): 107–127.
20 Shaun Gallagher, “Direct Perception in the Intersubjective Context,” Consciousness and Cognition 17, no. 2 (2008): 535–
543.
21 Krueger, “Seeing Mind in Action.”
22 Rochus Sowa, “Essences and Eidetic Laws in Edmund Husserlʼs Descriptive Eidetics,” in The New Yearbook for
Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. Burt Hopkins and Steven Crowell (London: Routledge, 2007), 7:77–
108.
23 Tom Froese and Shaun Gallagher, “Phenomenology and Artificial Life: Toward a Technological Supplementation of
Phenomenological Methodology,” Husserl Studies 26, no. 2 (2010): 86.
24 Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Response to McDowell,” Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2007a): 371–377; Hubert L. Dreyfus, “The Return of the Myth
of the Mental,” Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2007b): 352–365; John McDowell, “What Myth?” Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2007a): 338–351; John
McDowell, “Response to Dreyfus,” Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2007b): 366–370. See also Joseph K. Schear, ed., Mind, Reason, and
Being-in-the-World (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) for a lovely discussion.
25 Andrew Geeves, Doris J. F. McIlwain, John Sutton, and Wayne Christensen, “To Think or Not To Think: The Apparent
Paradox of Expert Skill in Music Performance,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 46, no. 6 (2014): 674–691; John Sutton,
Doris McIlwain, Wayne Christensen, and Andrew Geeves, “Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and
Habits Between Dreyfus and Descartes,” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42, no. 1 (2011): 78–103;
Wayne Christensen, Kath Bicknell, Doris J. F. McIlwain, and John Sutton, “The Sense of Agency and Its Role in Strategic
Control for Expert Mountain Bikers,” Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 2, no. 3 (2015): 340–353;
Wayne Christensen, John Sutton, and Doris J. F. McIlwain, “Cognition in Skilled Action: Meshed Control and the Varieties of
Skill Experience,” Mind & Language 31, no. 1 (2016): 37–66.
26 See John Sutton, Doris McIlwain, Wayne Christensen, and Andrew Geeves, “Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes,” 78–103;
Barbara Montero, Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Ellen
Fridland, “Automatically Minded,” Synthese 194, no. 11 (2017): 4337–4363; Gunnar Breivik, “Zombie-Like or
Superconscious? A Phenomenological and Conceptual Analysis of Consciousness in Elite Sport,” Journal of the Philosophy
of Sport 40, no. 1 (2013): 85–106.
27 Hubert L. Dreyfus, “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental,” in Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World, ed. Joseph K.
Schear (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 15–41.
28 Dreyfus, “The Return of the Myth of the Mental,” 353.
29 Dreyfus “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental,” 38.
30 Dreyfus “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental,” 34.
31 Simon Hø ding, A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 61.
32 For the full-fledged argument, see Simon Hø ding, “Expertise, Mind Wandering, and Amnesia,” in A Phenomenology of
Musical Absorption (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
33 Alvin I. Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006); Vittorio Gallese and Alvin I. Goldman, “Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-
Reading,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2, no. 12 (1998): 493–501.
34 Frederick A. Seddon and Michele Biasutti, “Modes of Communication Between Members of a String Quartet,” Small Group
Research 40, no. 2 (2009): 120.
35 Peter E. Keller, Giacomo Novembre, and Janeen Loehr, “Musical Ensemble Performance: Representing Self, Other and

Joint Action Outcomes,” in Shared Representations: Sensorimotor Foundations of Social Life, ed. Sukhvinder Obhi and
Emily Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 284.
36 Hø ding, A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption.
37 Simon Hø ding, “A Topography of Musical Absorption,” in A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption (Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2019).
38 Schoenbergʼs Verklärte Nacht is a sextet. Unfortunately, I do not have any data about the remaining two musiciansʼ
experience of the episode.
39 Simon Hø ding, “Part III Phenomenological Underpinnings of the Musically Extended Mind,” in A Phenomenology of
Musical Absorption (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
40 Alessandro Salice, Simon Hø ding, and Shaun Gallagher, “Putting Plural Self-awareness into Practice: The
Phenomenology of Expert Musicianship,” Topoi 38, no. 1 (2017): 197–209.
41 Thompson, Mind in Life; Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind.
42 Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science
(London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 28.
43 As Husserl states, if you could access the otherʼs experience from your first-person perspective, it would no longer be the
otherʼs, but rather your own perspective.
44 Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson, Ethnography: Principles in Practice (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 97.
45 Dan Zahavi, “You, Me and We: The Sharing of Emotional Experiences,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 22, nos. 1–2
(2015): 12.
46 Simon Hø ding, Kristian Martiny, and Andreas Roepstor , “Can We Trust the Phenomenological Interview? Metaphysical,
Epistemological, and Methodological Objections,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2023); Ravn, “Integrating
Qualitative Research Methodologies and Phenomenology”; Petitmengin, “Enaction as a Lived Experience Towards a
Radical Neurophenomenology.”
47 Ravn, “Integrating Qualitative Research Methodologies and Phenomenology.”
48 Hø ding, A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption, 48.
49 When one has conducted the interviews oneself, one remembers lots of bodily cues and gestures, which contributes to
oneʼs interpretation of the meaning of the utterances. This is an embodied and situated knowledge that is hard to
translate.
50 Shaun Gallagher, “Phenomenology and Experimental Design Toward a Phenomenologically Enlightened Experimental
Science,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, nos. 9–10 (2003): 85–99.
51 See Joona Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity (Chicago: Northwestern
University Press, 2014).
52 Thompson, “The Structure of Behaviour,” in Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Scott L.
Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012).
53 Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 2005).
54 Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
55 Apit Hemakom, Valentin Goverdovsky, Lisa Aufegger, and Danilo P. Mandic, “Quantifying Cooperation in Choir Singing:
Respiratory and Cardiac Synchronisation,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
(2016): 719–723; Viktor Müller, Julia A. M. Delius, and Ulman Lindenberger, “Complex Networks Emerging during Choir
Singing,” Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1431, no. 1 (2018): 85–101.

56 Ivana Konvalinka, Dimitris Xygalatas, Joseph Bulbulia, U e Schjødt, Else-Marie Jegindø, Sebastian Wallot, Guy Van Orden,
and Andreas Roepstor , “Synchronized arousal between Performers and Related Spectators in a Fire-Walking Ritual,”
PNAS 108, no. 20 (2011): 8514–8519.
57 Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki, “Tools for the Body (Schema),” Trends in Cognitive Science 8, no. 2 (2004): 79–86; Tamer
Soliman and Arthur M. Glenberg, “The Embodiment of Culture,” in The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, ed.
Lawrence Shapiro (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 207–220.
58 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
59 Hø ding, A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption, 234.
60 See Simon Hø ding, “The Hive Mind: Playing Together,” in A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption.
61 Salice, Hø ding, and Gallagher, “Putting Plural Self-awareness into Practice.”
62 Kristian Martiny, Juan Toro, and Simon Hø ding, “Framing a Phenomenological Mixed Method: From Inspiration to
Guidance,” Frontiers in Psychology 12, no. 602081 (2021).
63 Simon Hø ding, Wenbo Yi, Eigil Lippert, Victor Gonzales Sanchez, Laura Bishop, Bruno Laeng, Anne Danielsen, Alexander
Refsum Jensenius, and Sebastian Wallot. "Into the Hive-Mind: Shared Absorption and Cardiac Interrelations in Expert and
Student String Quartets.” Music & Science 6 (2023): 1–15.
64 Elke B. Lange, Fabian Zweck, and Petra Sinn, “Microsaccade-Rate Indicates Absorption by Music Listening,” Consciousness
and Cognition 55 (2017): 62.
65 Ibid, 73.
66 Ruth Herbert, Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation and Trancing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 109.
67 Hø ding, “A Topography of Musical Absorption,” 73–87.
68 Simon Hø ding and Torben Snekkestad, “Inner and Outer Ears: Enacting Agential Systems in Music Improvisation,” in
Philosophy of Improvisation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Theory and Practice, ed. Susanne Ravn, Simon Hø ding, and
James McGuirk (London: Routledge, 2021), 161–182.
69 D. Kahneman, Attention and E ort (Engelwood Cli s, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973); Bruno, Laeng, Sylvain Sirois, Gustaf
Gredebäck, “Pupillometry: A Window to the Preconscious?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7, no. 1 (2012): 18–27.
70 An experiment could look like this: https://www.uio.no/ritmo/english/news-and-

events/events/musiclab/2020/musictestlab/index.html.
71 I want to express my gratitude to the editors who warmly and constructively encouraged the writing of this chapter. I also
want to thank the members of the Danish String Quartet and other musicians who have generously shared their rich
experiences of musicking. Finally, I want to thank my wonderful colleagues at RITMO, who are constantly pushing through
disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of a better understanding of music, rhythm, and motion. The collective e orts of these
people led to a research concert at the DSQʼs own festival called “MusicLab Copenhagen” and is being published as a
special collection in Music and Science, called “MusicLab Copenhagen: A Research Concert with the Danish String Quartet”
edited by myself, Niels Christian Hansen, and Alexander Refsum Jensenius.
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The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Expanding

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Expanding Phenomenological Methods: Musical Absorption

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197577844.013.6 Pages C6S1–C6N71

Keywords: phenomenology, musical absorption, expertise, musical communication, phenomenological

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Expanding the Phenomenological Interview

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Musical Absorption between Heightened Attention and Mind Wandering

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Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Response to McDowell.” Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2007a): 371–377.

Fridland, Ellen. “Automatically Minded.” Synthese 194, no. 11 (2017): 4337–4363.

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Hø ding, Simon. A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

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McDowell, John. “Response to Dreyfus.” Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2007b): 366–370.

McDowell, John. “What Myth?” Inquiry, 50, no. 4 (2007a): 338–351.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

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Zahavi, Dan. Phenomenology: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2018.

6 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.

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21 Krueger, “Seeing Mind in Action.”

28 Dreyfus, “The Return of the Myth of the Mental,” 353.

29 Dreyfus “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental,” 38.

30 Dreyfus “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental,” 34.

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36 Hø ding, A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption.

41 Thompson, Mind in Life; Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind.

47 Ravn, “Integrating Qualitative Research Methodologies and Phenomenology.”

48 Hø ding, A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption, 48.

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58 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

59 Hø ding, A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption, 234.

61 Salice, Hø ding, and Gallagher, “Putting Plural Self-awareness into Practice.”

67 Hø ding, “A Topography of Musical Absorption,” 73–87.

70 An experiment could look like this: https://www.uio.no/ritmo/english/news-and-

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