Music, empathy and cultural understanding

In the age of the internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, music has unprecedented global distribution and influence on people's lives. It is a source of intense experiences of both the most individual (personal stereos) and massively communal (large-scale live events, and global simulcasts) kind; and it increasingly brings together or exploits an exceptional range of cultures and histories, through developments in 'world music', sampling, mash-up, re-release, archival recording, and hybridisation. The aim of this Research Development project is to pursue the idea that music affords powerful insights into other consciousnesses and cultural identities, and that in doing so it has powerful potential for cultural understanding. The objectives of the project are: 1) to bring together the considerable body of research and scholarship, across disciplines ranging from the neuroscience and psychology of music to the sociology and anthropology of music, and cultural musicology, that has proposed or presented evidence for music's power to promote empathy and social/cultural understanding through powerful affective, cognitive and social factors, and to propose a unifying and synthesising conceptual framework in which to connect and make sense of this disparate evidence, and to use that framework to highlight interdisciplinary points of convergence and divergence; 2) to undertake a novel piece of empirical research to further develop and test one important aspect of those claims; 3) to publish and disseminate the findings of the project, and in doing so to contribute to a developing case for the value of arts and culture to individuals and to society.

1. Who will benefit from this research?
Initially, and principally, it will be the AHRC and its targeted call, that will benefit from the research, which is intended to make a significant and powerful contribution to the 'cultural value' project. However, the hope must be that the collective outcome of this large ('cultural value') project will in time have a significant influence on public opinion and policy making. The arts, and music in particular at times (cf the decision to exclude music from the English Baccalaureate), have been under pressure from a sustained and myopic concentration on science and technology, and the case for the music (and the other arts) needs to be made in strong and convincing fashion. In the long wake of the so-called 'Mozart effect' (the claim that exposure to the music of Mozart increases spatial IQ), there is a real need to make a much more cogent and sophisticated case for the cultural, cognitive, social, affective, and therapeutic values of music - rather than attempting to pursue simplistic and ultimately counterproductive claims. This project promises to contribute to precisely that aim, and therefore potentially has very considerable national and international significance (the UK is not alone in the pressure on the arts). Much of the argument, and some of the necessary evidence , is already 'out there', but in a dispersed and disciplinarily disconnected form. This project aims to bring it together, add to it, and give the case a powerful and reasoned voice.

2. How will they benefit from this research?
This is largely covered above: the AHRC's targeted call will benefit from the addition of a strong piece of research discussing, evaluating and investigating music's role in, and capacity to bring about, empathy and cultural understanding, which will in turn contribute to the larger case for the value of arts and culture. The manner of the benefit will therefore be in sharing in an intellectually cogent, and strongly interdisciplinary, piece of high-level research that will contribute to the overall case. Similarly, the manner of the benefit to the wider intellectual, public, and policy-making communities will be in the provision of new and powerful thinking about the value of music to individuals and to society in general, and an awareness of its transformational potential. There are therefore broadly health and wellbeing consequences, certainly educational consequences, and arguably significant economic consequences - not only because the music industry (in its widest sense) is itself very significant economically, but also because (as is increasingly recognised) economic productivity as well as social 'health' is intimately bound up with the wellbeing and self-realisation of individuals and social groups - for which empathy and cultural understanding (the focus of the proposed research) are pivotal factors, and within which music has a particular role to play.