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How music connects: social sensory consciousness in musical ritual

Collective coupling and coordinated joint action in musical ritual settings are core elements of human cultural practices around the world. Studies of ritual and social cognition have paid increasing attention to the rich embodied, temporal, and sensorial dimensions of social coupling during ritual practice. Nonetheless, such studies have often framed the experience of rhythmic bodily coordination as the product of an “in-the-head” process whereby agents intentionally imitate the actions of others (Philips-Silver and Keller 2012; Patel et al. 2005). At most, this kind of imitation is mediated by motor resonance and action simulation processes that occur when brain regions that control movement—including motor, premotor, and sensorimotor cortices—are activated by the observation of others’ movements (Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004; Philips-Silver and Keller 2012). However, some perspectives believe that to take embodied and experiential aspects of synchronized movement seriously it is necessary to include activation of the entire motor body and peripheral nervous system—not just an internal, isolated mechanism that activates movement-related brain regions. In this commentary, I explore these more inclusive perspectives, for which distinct kinds of bodily awareness and social interaction achieved during musical ritual depend upon largescale patterns of rhythmically coordinated and distributed neural activity operating at multiple timescales (Tognoli and Kelso 2009). In short, successful social and musical coupling relies upon the transient synchronization of distinct frequency oscillations throughout the entire body, and this synchronization allows for brief temporal windows of social communication sustained by special kinds of shared bodily consciousness. For these perspectives, which are shared by enactivist theory (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007) and ecological psychology (Gibson 1979), social coupling arises from the coordination of certain action possibilities, or “affordances,” that are perceived by agents within a particular social context. The experience of social connection that is achieved through musical ritual means is supported by a set of diverse rhythmic affordances, as various sensory systems interact with music and with the motor synchronizations of others. In addition to the five traditional senses, musical rituals can also engage the proprioceptive/kinesthetic system, which is activated in the joints and tendons and supports perception of particular bodily movements, and the vestibular system, which is activated in the inner ear and facilitates awareness of the head and whole body’s position and movement in relation to its surroundings (Williamson and Anzalone 2001). Examples include propioceptive perception of the agent’s repetitive gestures, or the vestibular perception of head movements relative to rhythms of the music. Thus, in the case of shared musical experience, music acts as a rich and powerful regulator of social coupling within a particular cultural context (Insoll 2009; Kirschner and Ilari 2014). Compared with other kinds of shared musical experience, ritual musical time tends to be highly ordered by traditional norms; it contains particular action sequences that have to be learned. This skilled behavior includes the capacity to recognize the distinctive rhythmic affordances of the ritual that permit human agents to interact (Boivin 2009). A more stimulating and skillful musical experience allows for more senses to interact and thereby increases the number of rhythmic affordances that are available to promote social connections. Panculturally, musical rituals can be described as sensually oriented practices that are used by participants to connect with one another and with a dimension of experience that is deemed sacred. Music is nearly ubiquitous in ritual contexts; indeed many of the social couplings special to religious ritual happen within and through music. This behavior has been referred to as “rhythmic entrainment” or “sensorimotor synchronization” (Repp 2005). For example, in the musical rituals of the Calonarang or Rangda/Barong in Bali, participants synchronize their body movements with the periodic pulse of repetitive acoustic and movement patterns during a period of intense social connection (Fachner 2011). Lucas (2006) refers to the musical creation of a distinct space-time reality within the Afro-Brazilian religious ritual of Congado as a realm of “socio-musical chrono-interactions.” Material Religion volume 14, issue 3, pp. 423–425 DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2018.1485353