Music and Embodied Cognition

Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking

By: Arnie Cox

Narrated by: Marcus Freeman

Taking a cognitive approach to musical meaning, Arnie Cox explores embodied experiences of hearing music as those that move us both consciously and unconsciously. In this pioneering study that draws on neuroscience and music theory, phenomenology and cognitive science, Cox advances his theory of the "mimetic hypothesis", the notion that a large part of our experience and understanding of music involves an embodied imitation in the listener of bodily motions and exertions that are involved in producing music. Through an often unconscious imitation of action and sound, we feel the music as it moves and grows.

With applications to tonal and post-tonal Western classical music, to Western vernacular music, and to non-Western music, Cox’s work stands to expand the range of phenomena that can be explained by the role of sensory, motor, and affective aspects of human experience and cognition.

Published by Indiana University Press.

"One of the best studies on the role of conceptual metaphor in music comprehension and theory I've ever read." - Mark Johnson, author (with George Lakoff) of Philosophy in the Flesh

"This book puts forth a beautiful account of what it's like to listen to music." - Elizabeth Margulis, author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind

©2016 Arnie Cox (P)2018 Redwood Audiobooks

Intellectualizing the feeling of music

Honestly I was intrigued by the sample but in the content of the book, it’s still all a giant explanation of the same intellectualization of music. Clearly you still can’t know your way into feeling music and this author isn’t genuinely curious about that feeling. Or who knows maybe they’re just stuck trying to impress the other musical know it alls of the world. Hard pass.