Music, listener and extramusical experience

Abstract

The research empirically investigated the process of music listening and its extramusical outcome through the listeners’ perspective in a qualitative way incorporating an interdisciplinary approach which mainly consisted of musicology, (musical) semiotics and music psychology. The musical experiment took place with 24 Lithuanians, and consisted of an active music listening to three different musical excerpts (two songs with lyrics and one instrumental piece) followed by qualitative semi-structured interviews with each participant separately. As the results show, music-induced extramusical associations in almost all cases included these elements: emotion, visual imagery and association-references to other existing real-world items in media, music or audiovisual culture. Moreover, the associations were influenced by the subjects’ experience and perception which had been formed by their shared sociocultural environment. This led to the subjects’ perceiving somewhat similar meanings and associations evoked by music even if they were not familiar with the musical piece. Another important outcome was that if a musical piece contained lyrics, it was not the main factor in forming the listeners’ extramusical associations. These and other findings showed how much music listening is a complex but also quite creative process for the listener since audible music is able to induce a variety of responses including multifaceted extramusical associations full of emotional and visual content.