Brown Bag 2023 Showcase June Presentation | Professor William Thompson

Music engagement as environmental affordance: Probing the transformative benefits for individuals and society.

Across diverse cultures, music has a remarkable capacity to foster psychological and cognitive-motor health and wellbeing. It engages people on emotional, social, personal, physical, attentional, and attitudinal levels. In this talk, I will argue that when people engage with music, it can trigger a spectrum of psychosocial processes that collectively impact upon individuals and society. From this perspective, music engagement is understood as a goal-directed process-bundling activity. In informal settings, goals range from immediate perceptual experiences to identity exploration to the appreciation of music's causal and contextual aspects. In clinical settings, music treatments are carefully tailored to invoke specific neurological mechanisms aligned with therapeutic goals. By reviewing selected applications of music, I aim to illuminate the multifaceted nature of music and its diverse and intricate impact on our lives.