Guest Editors' Introduction: Music as Embodied Experience

Abstract

Perhaps more than ever, technology influences how people experience music. We live in an era of online music streaming services such as Spotify, app-based musical instrument lessons such as Yousician, and user-friendly digital audio workstations like Garageband. Respectively, these tools increase the consumption and awareness of new music, gamify instrumental tuition, and democratize the once “experts only” area of musical production. The technology in these applications has evolved to an extraordinary level whereby the software could be considered a coparticipant within the experience. Indeed, music technology can act as song recommender, teacher, and collaborator. In addition to technological advancements, we also are witnessing in the current era a shift in perspectives toward music’s societal function: Music is no longer simply a purely artistic pursuit but also a reliable therapeutic and salutogenic tool (see MacDonald, Kreutz & Mitchell, 2012). Music’s healing power has been observed since antiquity (the story of David using his skillful harp-playing to cast out evil spirits residing inside King Saul comes to mind), yet the focus on music’s role as a tool for emotional mood regulation (Saarikallio & Erkkilä, 2007) and how music-based interventions in clinical settings can aid in the process of stroke rehabilitation (Särkämö et al., 2008), just two diverse examples, is indeed unprecedented in history. Taken together, technological advancement and changing attitudes toward music’s societal function have led to new questions and topics for researchers interested in music perception and cognition. How is technology rewiring the musical brain? What role can music technology play in music therapy and music education? In the midto late-20th century, these questions would have been answered using a cognitivist approach. Within that framework, mental processes would have been understood to be analogous to a digital computer with the mind operating as a central information processor of inputs and outputs. In a Cartesian sense, the mind would have been seen as separate from the physical