ABSTRACT
Focusing on listening as an active process, this chapter develops an experiential approach to popular music listening. This chapter largely supports postmodernist and poststructuralist views of musical meaning, sharing with them a sensitivity to subjectivity, embodiment, meaning, listening context, and individual identity. However, the approach adopted here can also be used to generalise about listening experiences because it is based upon interactionist and schematic principles which underlie perception and cognition, drawn from two major research traditions on everyday human experience: the ecological theory of perception (formulated by James J. and Eleanor Gibson) and embodied cognition (particularly the cognitive linguistics and philosophy of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson). The chapter provides an important review of the ecological and embodied theories of perception and meaning that have increasingly featured in music studies since the 1990s, with an emphasis on inviting cooperation between disparate research perspectives. It concludes by considering the significance of music style (and style competence) to experiences of popular music listening.
