Review of Eric Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2005; paperback, 2011)

[1] Ten years have passed since the first publication of Ways of Listening. As with all anniversaries, this one presents us with an opportunity for reflection: to consider the ingenuity of Eric Clarke's project, to be sure, as well as its enduring relevance. Now, as it did then, Ways of Listening appeals to a wide audience in its content and tone. At the time, it offered the most extensive application of ecological psychology to music perception and analysis. And as a study of musical meaning from the standpoint of listening, it complements and challenges influential approaches that employ different frameworks, for instance those of semiotics, hermeneutics, and multimedia.(1) More broadly, Ways of Listening presents a significant attempt to integrate the perspectives of psychology and musicology. While Clarke notes in 2005 that only "partial convergence" between the two fields had taken place, in 2015, such a union is hardly uncommon. In the past decade alone, music scholars have celebrated several new books that deftly handle their interdisciplinary subject matter and tackle some rather weighty issues, including but not limited to: the way music evokes emotion; how listener expectations are formed; and the roles of metaphor, physical motion, and repetition in everyday musical experiences.(2) Against the current landscape, Clarke's central concern--how it is that listeners perceive musical meaning--is as relevant as ever. And remarkably, his discussion incorporates ideas that have gained currency over the years (no doubt contributing to the paperback reissue), most notably musical listening as an embodied experience. Clarke's writing style is straightforward and engaging, aimed at a readership both with and without formal psychological and music-theoretical training. Moreover, numerous lengthy and diverse music examples feature prominently.[2] Clarke concisely sets forth the following premises in his Introduction. Auditory perception works to discover "what sounds are the sounds of, and what to do about them" (3), that is, what actions to take. In turn, hearing sounds as "sounds of" contributes to an understanding of what sounds mean--where they are located, who or what produced them, and so forth. And musical sounds, Clarke underscores, inhabit the same world as everyday sounds. The perception of musical meaning, then, is the "awareness of meaning in music while listening to it" (4-5). The temporal aspect of this conception is key. Clarke distinguishes the online awareness of meaning from that arising upon reflection or in one's imagination in the absence of sound. Further, the relationship between an individual perceiver and the musical environment--what he calls "mutualism"--is a principal consideration in his approach, since, as Clarke notes, "sounds are often the sounds of all kinds of things at the same time" (3). To that end, he aims to consider musical materials in relation to the perceptual capacities of twenty-first-century listeners, using his own experiences as the starting point.[3] Ecological perceptual theory serves as the framework for Clarke's project (more on this in a moment); the "information-processing" view of music perception serves as a foil. In the latter perspective, listeners confront an environment that is inherently messy and unstructured, and to make sense of this, they abstract various features from the stimulus material to organize and interpret the data. This view is hierarchical, whereby processing starts with (raw) environmental data at one end ("bottom-up" processing), and prior experiences and conceptions guide interpretations at the other end ("top-down" processing). Clarke portrays the information-processing view as the "standard cognitive approach" (41) to perception and the dominant outlook in music psychology--a characterization that may strike some as overstated today.(3) Nevertheless, his summary works well to set in relief the view he subsequently details: that the world is in fact a "highly structured environment subject to both the forces of nature. …