Listening Modes in Concerts: A Review and Conceptual Model

While the use of music in everyday life is much studied, the ways of listening to music during live performances have hardly been considered. To fill this gap and provide a starting point for further research, this article accomplishes two goals: First, it presents a literature review of the field of listening modes, encompassing seven categories of modes of listening to music. The categories identified in the literature are: diffuse listening, bodily listening, emotional listening, associative listening, structural listening, reduced listening, and causal listening. Subsequently, a conceptual model of music listening in Western classical concerts is developed on the basis of the identified categories and the Ecological Theory of Perception. In this framework, the Western classical concert is understood as a social-aesthetic event in which the experience of the audience is determined by many factors. It is argued that the frame of the concert (location, setting, staging, light, etc.) influences the listening mode and this in turn influences the aesthetic experience. The hypotheses derived from the review and the model are suitable for empirical investigation and expand the understanding of music listening in concerts and beyond.