Music, Hypothetical Scenarios and Agency
In 2014 I hypothesized that music acts primarily on hypothetical emotions, ie emotional responses to hypothetical or fictional scenarios.
However there certain real-life emotional scenarios that often strongly motivate people to listen to music.
Two significant examples are funerals, and after a relationship breakup (especially if you were the party that got dumped). Also people can be inclined to play or listen to music in celebration of some event that makes them very happy.
I propose an alternative hypothesis to explain why music works with both fictional scenarios and certain real-life scenarios.
This hypothesis is based not on the fictional or real nature of the emotion, but on the agency of the listener.
In particular, music is associated with non-agency.
That is:
- Music interacts most strongly with emotion when the listener is not thinking about what action to take in response to the situation that the emotion is about.
In other words, music is all about feeling the emotion, but not about doing anything in response to the emotion, and not even about thinking about what to do.
There are various reasons why a person might not bother to think about what to do in response to an emotion:
- The emotion is a response to a situation where there is a problem which has no solution – therefore there is no point in even thinking about how to solve the problem.
- The emotion is a positive emotion in response to a situation where something has got better – if there was a problem, it has gone away, perhaps because someone has done something to solve the problem, or perhaps because the problem just went away by itself. Either way there is no need to take further action.
- A problem may exist, but the person with the problem may be in a temporary situation where they cannot take any immediate action to solve the problem, so any doing or thinking about what action to take can be deferred until some later time.
- If the emotion is based on problems in a fictional scenario, then there is no need for the audience to think about what to do, because those problems are just fictional problems.
In short, one of the following:
- No possible solution
- No actual problem
- No urgency
- Not real
The death of a loved one is an extreme example of a situation where:
- It is very sad, especially if it was someone who died before their time.
- The problem is that the person is dead, and that is a problem that truly has no solution – there is no way to make a dead person come alive again.
Being the person who was dumped in a relationship is another example of a situation where there is no solution.
The break-up of a relationship seems less final than death, and couples who separate do often eventually get back together again. However, in the short term, the person who initiates the breakup has already come to the conclusion that the relation has serious issues where there is nothing that their partner is able or willing to do to fix those issues.
It follows that a relationship breakup where you are the dumped partner is almost always a problem that has no immediate solution, and all you can do in the short term is feel the emotion that you have about the breakup, and there is little to be gained by trying to think about how to solve the problem.
In the case of fictional scenarios, there is an additional nuance.
On the one hand, the fictional nature of the fiction implies that nothing in the story really matters, so the audience is free to experience the emotions of the protagonists without feeling any obligation to come up with solutions to the problems that the protagonists have.
On the other hand, fiction does often “draw us in”, and to a certain extent we in the audience become the protagonist.
So to fully achieve a situation where the audience can be in a non-agentic state, not attempting to think about what action to take in a given emotional situation, the protagonist has to be in a non-agentic state in an emotional situation in the story.
That is, music interacts most strongly with the audience’s response to a fictional story when the protagonist is experiencing a strong emotion, and the protagonist is not acting or thinking agentically in response to the situation causing the emotion.
For example, one of the other three items in the list above might apply to the protagonist’s situation, ie:
- A problem with no possible solution
- No actual problem
- A problem, but no urgency
One classical trope for movies or TV shows, where a musical score is almost always added, is the scenario “protagonist travelling after something has happened”.
In this trope, stuff has happened which has an emotional impact on the protagonist. Following these events the protagonist needs to travel to somewhere else. Often they are a passenger, be it in a car, or bus, or train. Sometimes they are the driver, but the drive itself is non-agentic in the sense that it does not require any active decision-making relating to the emotional situation, ie it’s not a car chase. In either case, as passenger or driver, the protagonist is not taking action directly related to the situation, and they are not necessarily actively planning any action to take. The problem exists, but there is no urgency to solve it, ie the required travel is long enough that, for example in the case where they are a passive passenger, the protagonist can afford to just look out the window gazing at the passing scenery. While staring out the window they may be “processing” their emotions, but they are not actively devising clever plans to deal with the situation.
(I will qualify my observations about the use of music in films and TV in relation to the type of music used in a score. In particular, parts of the story that have the right combination of emotion and non-agency are the parts of the story that will have a musical score that is most similar to the type of music that people will listen to in a context of just listening to music – ie the sort of music that might get played on the radio. Some type of music may be used in other more agentic portions of the story, but this music is usually music that would be considered less “musical” if you were just listening to it as music.)
Possibly Evolutionary Explanations
Suppose we accept this hypothesis, that music enables or encourages the experience of emotion without agency.
Why should such a thing exist at all? What purpose does it serve?
When considering evolutionary explanations for the existence of music, we have various possibilities:
- Music evolved because it serves a biological function which it still serves right now.
- Music evolved because it served a biological function up until the “recent” past, however due to changed circumstances it no longer serves a useful function, but, it has not yet had time to “evolve away” (so it still exists).
- Music is somehow derived from an earlier biological functionality, let us call it “protomusic”, which existed in the more distant past, and this earlier protomusic served a biological function then.
For the moment I will ignore the question of which of these might apply, and just consider the general question of how experiencing emotion without agency might serve a biological function.
If music allows or encourages the experience of emotion which is not our own real emotion, then:
- It might be someone else’s real emotion.
- It might be an emotion that is purely hypothetical, arising from a hypothetical scenario.
In both these cases we can see that the suppression of agency serves a secondary function, which is that it allows us to experience an emotion that is not our own real emotion, without creating an obligation to act on that emotion.
So we can get the benefit of experiencing that emotion, to know “what it is like”, without having to pay the cost of actually acting on that emotion (and without even having to pay the cost of bothering to think about how one might act on that emotion).
For example, we can understand what it is like to be the other person who has a certain problem, without being obliged to put in actual effort trying to solve that person’s problem.
This notion of a suppressive secondary function is very similar to what happens with dreaming:
- Something in your brain (the “dream-maker”) constructs hypothetical dream scenarios and narratives.
- You as “you” experience those dreams, as if they were real.
- The dreams provide some sort of practice for your brain in how it processes those hypothetical scenarios.
- The secondary suppressive function is that voluntary muscle activity is suppressed, so that your body does not waste energy or expose itself to danger from attempting to act in response to the entirely fictional dream scenarios.
Religion
Music is heavily used in religious contexts.
One could readily draw the conclusion that religion is more like fiction and not so much like non-fiction.
Most religions are socially defined belief systems.
If you want to join the social group defined by the religion, then you have to at least pretend to believe in it.
Within any particular religion, maybe some of the alleged believers do believe in their religion, and maybe some of them don’t really.
My hypothesis about the association of music with emotion and non-agency can be applied to the use of music in religious contexts.
If music is being performed in a religious ceremony, perhaps including songs with lyrics that make various assertions about the nature of reality that follow from the doctrinal content of the religion, then the audience is free to experience the emotional consequences of the “truth” of their religion, while at the same time the music is suppressing any tendency or obligation to actually act on those doctrines – indeed the “believers” don’t even have to think about what action might be required.
Later on, when the music has finished, and the religious service has finished, and all the “believers” have left the church and gone home, they might or might not act according to the beliefs or doctrines of their religion.
But right in the moment, when everyone is together, listening to the music, maybe waving their hands in the air and joining in the singing, no actual action is required.
Maladaptive Daydreaming
Music-driven maladaptive daydreaming seems like something that contradicts the hypothesis of non-agency, because the maladaptive daydreamer is often daydreaming that they themselves are acting in some imaginary situation.
However, if you follow detailed accounts of how MDers live their lives, you will find that their daydreaming does not result in the actual solution of any real-life problems. So the daydreamer is not so much thinking about what action to take in order to solve a problem – rather they are imagining that they are taking actions and then they are imagining that those actions are successful. (And in some cases, they have negative fantasies where they imagine that the actions fail badly.)
So it’s not actual agency, it’s more of a fake agency.