Aesthetic Experience — a topic at the cross-roads between philosophy and psychology

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Das Musikerleben als personaler Gestaltungsprozess

Experimental music-psychology tries to discover correlations between listening to a certain kind of music and certain psychic or vegetative reactions. But these correlations cannot reflect how music really is experienced. The author tries to demonstrate theoretical and methodical problems connected with this fact by discussing some methodical approaches to the experience of music and by reflecting upon the balance between subjective and objective components of individual reactions. The reported results of the author\u27s experiments reveal clearly that individual experience of music is much more determined by subjective psychic and vegetative dynamics of reaction than by general reaction patterns attached to a certain musical stimulus. Furthermore, there are some interesting connexions between the subjective way of experiencing music and the individual repertory of expression as well as the subjective structure of needs and the individual history of the listening person. The author concludes that a psychological theory cannot grasp the phenomenon of subjective experience of music by simple stimulus-response patterns only. On the contrary, the experience of music has to be interpreted as an experience of "meaningful patterns" ("Bedeutungen") in the sense of Jakob von Uexküll\u27s theoretical considerations in the field of perception psychology. In the sense of this considerations, experience of music should not be considered a passive and receptive process, but an individual process of Gestalt-forming, which is determined by personality, and in which the individual is reflected. (DIPF/Orig.

Understanding our experience of music: What kind of psychology do we need?

   Background in the psychology of music. The historical development of the psychology of music largely followed that of psychology in general. In the 20th century it adopted the research methods and interests of cognitive psychology and more recently has turned to new interdisciplinary connections with psychobiology and the neurosciences. There remains, however, a certain inadequacy regarding work in the psychology of music and cultural psychology and as well of interpretative research aimed at interpreting the role of music in those processes, processes Bruner called "the nature and cultural shaping of meaning-making, and the central place it plays in human action". Background in historical musicology and cultural anthropology. Historical musicology and cultural anthropology maintain that experiencing and understanding music represents a process fundamentally dependent upon cultural context. This begs the question as to how cultural context influences social and individual representations of music in the sense that a particular "style of aesthetic experience" typifies a historical period. Although this is a genuine psychological question, it cannot be answered by a psychology which is restricted to "ahistorical" explanations of information processing. Thus from a cultural anthropological perspective there is strong interest in any kind of "cultural psychology" which is able to conceptualise the dynamic interactions between culturally determined "social representations" of music and the individual mind. Goals. We argue for a "cultural turn" in the psychology of music. Following developments within psychology, research over recent decades in the psychology of music has concentrated on neuro-cognition while cultural aspects have been underestimated as they continue to be in psychology in general. Conclusions. An important task for an interdisciplinary framework that wishes to include the cultural sciences and psychology should be to review recent cultural psychological theories to assess their implications for a psychological theory of music. As examples we use Ernst E. Boesch's Symbolic Action Theory which explicitly refers to the role of aesthetic experience in cultural contexts and Alfred Lang's "semiotic ecology" which provides an appropriate model for conceptualising the complex relations between the development of cultural patterns and the development of related individual representations