Ruth Herbert is a Lecturer in Music and Head of Performance at the University of Kent. She is a music psychologist and performer with a wide-ranging track record of publications in the fields of music in everyday life, music, health and wellbeing, music and consciousness (including ASC and Trance), sonic studies, evolutionary psychology and music education. Ruth is the author of Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation and Trancing (London & New York: Routledge, 2016[2011]). As a professional pianist, Ruth has performed nationally and internationally with various ensembles, notably recording soundtracks commissioned by the British Film Institute (BFI) for silent films. She is an editorial board member for the Journal of Sonic Studies.

David Clarke is Professor of Music at Newcastle University. He is a music theorist with wide a range of research interests, encompassing analytical, philosophical, cultural and critical approaches to music. He is currently engaged in research on consciousness and phenomenology in relation to music, and with Eric Clarke he is co-editor of and contributor to Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives (OUP, 2011). David has published widely on the composer Michael Tippett, including a monograph, The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett (CUP, 2001). He has also written on Arvo Pärt, Eminem and John Cage, and on issues of modernism, postmodernism and cultural pluralism, most notably in articles on 'Elvis and Darmstadt' and Radio 3's Late Junction. A further current research interest is North Indian classical music, in both theory and practice. David is an associate editor on the editorial board of the journal Twentieth-Century Music.

Eric Clarke is Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow of Wadham College. He has published on topics in the psychology of music, musical meaning, music and consciousness, musical creativity, and the analysis of pop music. Recent projects include work on music, empathy and cultural understanding; and empirical approaches to nineteenth-century orchestral and chamber music. He is co-editor of Empirical Musicology (2004, with Nicholas Cook), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009, with Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink), Music and Consciousness (2011, with David Clarke), and Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music (2017, with Mark Doffman); and is the author of Ways of Listening (2005), and Music and Mind in Everyday Life (2010, with Nicola Dibben and Stephanie Pitts). Eric is a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

• I. Music, consciousness, and the Four Es


• 1: Christoph Seibert: Situated approaches to musical experience


• 2: Lawrence Zbikowski: Cognitive extension and musical consciousness


• 3: Joel Krueger: Music as affective scaffolding


• 4: Eric Clarke: Empathy and the ecology of musical consciousness


• 5: Maria A. G. Witek: Feeling at one: Socio-affective distribution, vibe and dance music consciousness


• 6: David Borgo: Entangled: Strange loops of action, attention, awareness and affect in musical improvisation


• II. Consciousness in musical practice


• 7: Simon Høffding: Performative passivity. Lessons on phenomenology and the extended musical mind with the Danish String Quartet


• 8: David Clarke: Music, Phenomenology, and 'the natural attitude': analysing Sibelius, thinking with Husserl, reflecting on Dennett


• 9: Mark Doffman: Practical time consciousness in musical performance


• 10: Martin Norgaard: The interplay between conscious and subconscious processes during expert musical improvisation


• 11: Robert Harris and Bauke M. de Jong: Conscious and non-conscious aural perception in music performance: an embodied perspective


• 12: Shierry Weber Nicholsen: What kind of conscious activity is 'listening to music'? A contribution from Theodor Adorno by way of psychoanalysis


• III. Kinds of musical consciousness


• 13: Ruth Herbert: Absorption and openness to experience: an everyday tale of traits, states and consciousness change with music


• 14: Kat Agres, Louis Bigo, and Dorien Herremans: The impact of musical structure on enjoyment and absorptive listening states in trance music


• 15: Freya Bailes: Musical imagery and the temporality of consciousness


• 16: Vivek Virani: Dual consciousness and unconsciousness: the structure and spirituality of polymetric tabla compositions


• 17: Lanlan Kuang: (Un)consciousness? Music in the Daoist context of non-being