Motor constraints shaping musical experience

Abstract

In recent decades, we have seen a surge in published work on embodied music cognition, and it is now broadly accepted that musical experience is intimately linked with experiences of body motion. It is also clear that music performance is not something abstract and without restrictions, but something traditionally (i.e., before the advent of electronic music) constrained by our possibilities for body motion. The focus of this paper is on these various constraints of sound-producing body motion that shape the emergent perceptual features of musical sound, as well as on how these constraints may enhance our understanding of agency in music perception.