Processes of absorption: Experimental psychology meets phenomenological mixed methods

Leading figures in music psychology claim that in order to perform well together, musicians must read each other’s minds, share plans and predictions, or put themselves in each other’s musical shoes. In line with recent claims from simulation theory, the mirror neuron system is putatively involved in these sophisticated cognitive processes. Simon Høffding works with high-level classic and jazz musicians, combining in-depth interviews with physiological measures. He collaborates with different academic institutions such as the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion (RITMO, Un. of Oslo), the Center for Subjectivity Research (Un. of Copenhagen) and the Interacting Minds Centre (Un. of Århus). He published a book entitled "A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption" (2019, Springer).

In the first half of my talk, I describe how my ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with one of the world’s best string quartet’s, namely “The Danish String Quartet”, nuances and put pressure on this picture. A phenomenological analysis of such interviews, reveal that expert musicians employ different communicative strategies to achieve intense states of shared absorption. The most intense forms seem to be facilitated by a sense of shared bodies and movement, what I call “interkinesthetic affectivity”. Hence sophisticated cognitive machinery is often unnecessary for shared absorption. This conclusion is further corroborated by results from a recent experiment conducted at the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhythm, Time and Motion. Here, we showed that performing musical experts enjoy significantly increased heart rate variability synchronization compared to student musicians.

In the second half of the talk, I turn to discuss the methods used to generate these results. How can phenomenology strengthen qualitative research such that it can nuance, challenge or strengthen findings in psychology and neurosciences? And how do we best “front-load” findings from this perspective into new experiments? Finally, I make some suggestions on how the detailed phenomenological study of musical absorption might enrich neuro-phenomenological studies of meditative absorption.