Body

Abstract

This chapter takes a closer look at listeners’ bodily capabilities. The author first draws on his own and others’ observational studies to show how, in response to music, listeners’ capacities for movement unfold in two distinct ways: (1) by synchronizing with a pulse, and (2) by coordinating their movements with events separated by longer, or uneven, spans of time. He then argues that these two categories of movement constitute a kinesthetic knowledge of music’s temporal processes—of “how music goes.” He develops a comprehensive account of this knowledge as a contextual enactment, through bodily engagement with the world, of the dynamics, affectivity, and intercorporeality of our involvement with the world—as a dynamic feel of living as an animate and environmentally embedded being engaged in some task.