Music, bodies and relationships: An ethnographic contribution to embodied cognition studies

This article sets out the methodology and results of part of an ethnographic study of North Indian music performance where qualitative interviews were analyzed with grounded theory to explore how musicians conceive of musical communication. The findings highlight the importance of socially-responsive movement cues that musicians use to co-ordinate their participation in musical events. Effective musical communication, as explored in this article, is seen to depend on the manifestation and maintenance of the relationships between participants. This analytical attention to the moment-by-moment processes of interaction that musicians must engage in chimes with current enactive approaches to cognition. The article concludes by discussing the role of music research in the development of such work, suggesting that empirical research into music as social interaction could provide important insights for an enactive understanding of human cognition.