ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore some of the psychological principles that might help to explain the embodied experiences and responses of listeners/spectators to musical sound and movement, understood from a broadly ecological perspective. Listening to music, therefore, is powerfully embodied and 'motional' with sounds specifying either the real actions of the musicians who may be making the sounds or the virtual actions of virtual bodies and instruments. The musical expression of emotion bears a close resemblance to human vocal and motor expression of emotion, involving similar auditory and gestural cues, with the consequence that listeners may respond to music as they would do to the perceived emotional state of a conspecific. In summary, a range of neuroscientific and behavioural evidence points to some of the mechanisms by means of which human beings can experience a powerful and empathic sense of intersubjectivity or even merged subjectivity.
