Introduction
The successes of modern Western healthcare have included extended life expectancy and reduced illness and disease. Along with these gains, we increasingly search for interventions to facilitate people’s quality of life in terms of both individual and group senses of wellness, satisfaction and contentment (www.mindhealthconnect.org.au/wellbeing). In other words, well-being is a strongly desired outcome for modern everyday life. As the introduction to this volume indicates, engagement in music (via listening and playing) has been found to have a positive role to play in everyday well-being. Music listening accompanies us through our everyday activities, owing to the ever-sophisticated technologies at our fingertips. As this chapter will reveal, in Western contexts, we often regulate our moods listening to music with different types of music satisfying different needs. Additionally, making music exerts considerable demands on the human central nervous system as it interactively engages memory and motor skills. Even when well embedded in memory and automated—for example in someone who has a piece well learned—the activity of performing music engages significant cognitive load, requiring ongoing active decision-making and fine mental and motor adjustments. Evidence also points towards these very demands having positive effects on brain plasticity, with musicians possessing more pronounced mental flexibility among those engaged in skilled activities (Altenmüller and Gruhn 2002; Altenmüller et al. 1997; Schellenberg 2004).
As suggested above, there are cognitive advantages for those who make music, but as a medium that typically has a strong social component, musical activity requires interpersonal interaction and aural and visual feedback to monitor and respond to unfurling music-specific and collaborative social cues from co-performers and/or audiences (Davidson and Broughton 2016). It seems that these interactions have further positive impact with the development of micro-social cue sensitivity as a vital part of music making. Cognitive enhancement and social skills can be developed at any time across the lifespan and, since music demands these intellectual and collaborative behaviours, it is particularly effective in accessing elements that help people feel in control, socially included and consequently experience positive well-being outcomes (see Davidson 2011).
The current chapter explores the specific well-being benefits that diverse forms of musical engagement can promote from the particular perspective of the social and applied psychology of music. Broadly speaking, this research has included explorations of the musical materials employed, the emotions evoked, the mode of presentation and the social context of the music. The disciplinary approach is predominantly evidence-based, addressing empirical questions (Skingley et al. 2011).
Historical Context
The first social psychologist of music to contribute to the field was Paul Farnsworth (1899–1978), with the text The Social Psychology of Music (Farnsworth 1958, 1969). Farnsworth was a radical behaviourist whose accomplishments in the psychology of music at Stanford were trailblazing. He researched the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the various schools of psychology in his acclaimed publication with sociologist Richard LaPiere, Social Psychology (LaPiere and Farnsworth 1949).
Why begin with a reminder of investigative beginnings? In part to show that the modern discipline of psychology has been interested in the systematic study of music as a behaviour leading to social benefit for over 60 years. Also, to highlight that Farnsworth’s early investigations explored music’s potential for: expressing characteristics of the individual in society; reflecting and generating the processes of socialisation; and aiding with social adjustment and social interaction. The words ‘health’ and ‘well-being’ are not part of his discourse, but it is clear that music was explored as a tool for social facilitation and, in this way, was evaluated in terms of its contribution to social well-being. The research explored in the current chapter includes studies which have similar social and applied psychological agendas, their explicit intention being to study music and its role in a social context. Whether or not a specific intention of well-being benefits was a part of the research design in the cases explored, both health and well-being outcomes were nonetheless realised.
Continuing with the history of Farnsworth’s studies in the 1940s and 1950s, it is vitally important to realise that his work was radically different from equivalent studies in the main field of psychology that were focused on an individual’s perception and cognition and did not consider social and cultural impact on these capacities (North and Hargreaves 2008). In his texts, Farnsworth stressed what he believed to be the misguided nature of much of the psychological enquiry: that it focused on only what happened in the brain, usually explored in a sequence from sensation to thought and action. In other words, the role of social interaction was ignored in terms of how thought and perception were shaped. The orientation of Farnsworth’s ideology is found in the introduction to the third edition of the textbook, Social Psychology, that ‘the behavior of man [sic.] is largely a product of the behavior of other men [sic.], known collectively and abstractly as “society”’ (LaPiere and Farnsworth 1949, p. 5).
After Farnsworth, the interest in social-psychological and applied aspects of music was relatively slow to emerge, with social psychologists tending to investigate theories that accounted for cultural practices, often manipulating a task experimentally to investigate its social impact. In fact, the direct investigation of health benefits of musical engagement has been the principal focus of the discipline of music therapy. Music therapy has had a strong emphasis on the medical model of treatment, much of which has emerged from the discipline’s roots in hospital settings—for example, being part of a multidisciplinary team treating a specific condition for functional health gain such as physical function improvement after stroke or mood regulation for bipolar disorder (Bunt 1994). But, it is important to acknowledge a strand of therapeutic practice and theory that emerged in Scandinavia that is now recognised as Community Music Therapy (Pavlicevic and Ansdell 2004), because it is typically focused within real-world community context, and has social interaction—‘communitas’—at its core. An example of such music therapy might be work in a community choir or with a school class. This approach has as its distinguishing features that trained music therapists work as facilitators of social processes using music as the tool to direct the interpersonal and group relationships.
Music therapy is not the disciplinary focus of this chapter, but it is essential to acknowledge the powerful role music therapists have had in emphasising the role of the social context of music making in terms of the promotion of health and well-being. Those interested in this specific field are recommended to explore the work of Brynjulf Stige (e.g., Ansdell and Stige 2016; Rolvsjord and Stige 2013), and also Gary Ansdell (e.g., Ansdell 2014; Pavlicevic and Ansdell 2004).
After Farnsworth, the next significant psychology text on music and its social function came along some 60 years later, with Adrian North and David Hargreaves’ (2008) The Social and Applied Psychology of Music. Their text maps areas of concern similar to those pursued by Farnsworth, but represents the burgeoning interest in the field that developed in the late 1990s. Reflecting theoretical refinements in psychological enquiries more generally, North and Hargreaves organised their discussions aligned to Willem Doise’s (1986) intraindividual, interindividual, socio-positional and ideological frameworks that consider increasingly broad concepts and applications, reflecting the current volume’s interest in micro- to macro-practical and theoretical accounts of music. Again, while North and Hargreaves did not promote a specific health and well-being perspective, they nonetheless addressed topics such as identity, listening and performance behaviours, presenting research findings with implications for health and well-being benefits.
Given that all of the authors mentioned thus far have come from Western cultures and research paradigms, it is evident that the work undertaken in the field of social and applied psychology of music has been within Western societies, and, more specifically, with those of Caucasian European backgrounds. So inevitably, particular social practices form the evidence-base of the current chapter. This is problematic as there are other cultures where arts practices are strongly integrated into everyday life and whose roots are very clearly articulated as being of central importance to personal and cultural health (e.g., the Venda of Limpopo, South Africa—Emberly 2012). But, again, this is outside of the scope of the current chapter.
The current chapter presents a survey of recent social-psychological literature broadly, and the authors also draw from their own research offering case studies to highlight evidence of health and well-being benefits when applying a social-psychological approach to music studies. The chapter is constructed in three parts: the effects of listening to music; making music; and a final section which discusses theories that show promising application for future research that addresses health and well-being from a social and applied music psychology perspective. In each section, micro to meso levels are embraced, working through examples of studies that adopt intraindividual perspectives to those that realise interindividual positive outcomes.
Social-Psychological Research on Music Listening and Its Relationship to Well-Being
Can Musical Preferences Influence Social Behaviour and Impact Well-Being?
One of the larger studies published exploring music and social behaviour was undertaken by North (2010). In it, 36,000 people in more than 60 countries wer...