This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available in print from Oxford University Press.For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended.
Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we
use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones
and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head
resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new
forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold
emotional consciousness, including the self-regulative processes constitutive of
emotional consciousness. In developing this idea, I consider the ‘material’ and
‘worldmaking’ character music, and I apply these considerations to two case studies:
music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture