Music as affective scaffolding

Abstract

For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. This chapter argues that music is a ‘beyond-the-head’ resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. The chapter focuses on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional consciousness, including the self-regulative processes constitutive of emotional consciousness. In developing this idea, the chapter considers the ‘material’ and ‘worldmaking’ character of music, applying these considerations to two case studies: music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture.