Ethnomusicologist Monique Ingalls has collected examples of trance induced by repetitive music, ranging from Sufi spinning in India to Contemporary Pentecostal trancing in the American South to the trancing of bissu (transves-tite priests) in Indonesia. Gilbert Rouget (1980) and Judith Becker (2004) have systematically investigated the phenomenon of musical trancing, and been care-ful to acknowledge that the practice arises diff erently in diff erent times, places, and cultures. But in many diff erent circumstances in many diff erent places, one kind of behavior that has been linked with repetitive music is trancing. If we can assume that trancing is an intensifi cation or exaggeration of ordinary experiences of music, rather than a phenomenon of an entirely diff erent ilk, then a consid-eration of repetitive music’s role in trance may help us understand more about the perceptual processes ordinarily involved in listening to repetitive music.
Becker observes that “in trance, the inner languaging stops (Friedson 1996: 19).
Similarly, for ‘deep listeners’, simply playing or listening to music alone will halt the inner language. As an inhibitor of the inner language, deep musical listen-ing parallels trance” (2004, p. 29). Invested, engaged listenlisten-ing, accordlisten-ing to this account, mirrors the elements of trance. Herbert (2011) links the familiarity of music that has been repeated to its tendency to induce what she views as “every-day trancing” (a dissociation from surroundings paired with a deep absorption with sounding music), because unfamiliar sounds raise vigilance and conscious awareness, elements antithetical to trance. Th e more familiar a piece is, the more
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a listener can respond automatically, allowing for the suppression of explicit thought and an increased sense of bodily involvement with the music.
Becker (2004) defi nes trance as
a bodily event characterized by strong emotion, intense focus, the loss of a strong sense of self, usually enveloped by amnesia and a cessation of the inner language. Following James, I wish to include that trance is an event that accesses types of knowledge and experience which are inaccessible in nontrance events, and which are felt to be ineff able, not easily described or spoken of (p. 43).
Supporting the notion that trance represents one point along a continuum of musical experiences rather than a truly separate phenomenon, many of these characteristics overlap signifi cantly with those chronicled by Gabrielsson and Lindström in their account of strong experiences of music. Trance, in fact, is mentioned as a possible characteristic of strong experiences of music. Becker’s description of trance simply brings some of these characteristics to further prominence, particularly the qualities understood to surround the loss of a sense of self: a kind of amnesia, and a cessation of inner language. Both of these qual-ities can be understood to refl ect a shift from a state engaged with cognitive, declarative kinds of representations to a state engaged with embodied, proce-dural ones; the kind of state, I have argued, that repeated sequences of tones encourage us to enter, by exploiting circuitry devoted to sequence learning. Th e experience of an external force (namely, sound) engaging these kinds of repre-sentations can contribute to a sense of transcendence, a sense of being played by the music, or a sense that the boundaries of the self have dissolved into the surroundings. Because repetition allows the sequence to be gone through auto-matically, without att entional control, a person is free to marvel at the nonver-bal, physical response she is sustaining in response to objective sound. With suffi cient reduction in executive monitoring, she can enter a trancelike state, where other cognitive kinds of percepts (inner language and explicit memory, for example) fall away.
A less extreme version of this same kind of process underlies much every-day musical pleasure. Pereira et al. (2011) used fMRI to establish that emotion-related limbic and paralimbic regions as well as reward circuitry were more active for familiar than unfamiliar music; the study’s authors interpret these results as evidence that familiarity (i.e., repetition) is a critical factor in engaging listeners emotionally with music. Interestingly, familiar music also triggered increased activation in the basal ganglia and the motor cortex, further supporting the hypothesis that repetitions of music encourage encoding as auto-matic sequences.
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Consuming, pleasurable musical experiences also connect to a highly satisfying state described by Mikhail Csíkszentmihályi (1997) as “fl ow.”
When someone has achieved a state of fl ow, bodily and temporal aware-ness recede, and a person fi nds himself totally immersed in the activity at hand. Music performance is explicitly mentioned as an example of an activ-ity during which this state can arise, but I would suggest that music listen-ing can produce the same state. Indeed, Csíkszentmihályi (Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi, 2002) later came to articulate this possibility, and Herbert (2011), Diaz (2011), and Lamont (2011, 2012) have all recently examined it. Flow seems to occupy a place on the spectrum between ordinary music lis-tening on one end and full-blown trance on the other, exhibiting many of the properties of both. By recruiting motor circuitry and engaging representa-tion as automatic sequences, repetirepresenta-tion facilitates the generarepresenta-tion of this state, fostering an intimate connection to the music while bypassing conceptual cognition and allowing the sound to seem “lived” rather than “perceived.”
As discussed in Chapter 1, a recent study (Margulis, 2010) showed that par-ticipants without special musical training reported increased enjoyment of excerpts of Beethoven String Quartets when they were presented on their own rather than when they were prefaced by information about the expres-sive or structural content of the music. Listeners seemed to prefer an unme-diated, “lived” experience of the sound, rather than a more “cognized” one, invested in drawing connections between the acoustic phenomena and some conceptual entities. In the inimitable words of Leonard Meyer, “listening to music intelligently is more like knowing how to ride a bicycle than knowing why a bicycle is rideable” (1973, p. 17). One distinctive joy of musical listen-ing comes from a kind of procedural immersion rather than a more declara-tive understanding. Repetition is an important element that encourages this kind of att ending.
Garcia (2005) builds his account for the pleasure of repetition in Electronic Dance Music (EDM) on the notion of function or process pleasure—pleasure that arises from the act of doing something rather than achieving some ultimate goal. He contrasts process pleasure with satiation pleasure, using the example of baking a cake: although the act of eating it might bring satiation pleasure, the act of baking it could bring process pleasure. For Garcia, repetition itself constitutes a kind of process, aff ording involvement and mastery by way of dancing or listen-ing. Although these qualities are particularly prominent in the ebullient looping of EDM, they are present to some degree in even much more reserved styles that feature musical repetition, such as the Classical rondo; and even in styles that themselves feature litt le repetition, if our behavior in relation to them (e.g., multiple replays of a recording) entails lots of repetition, we become connected to the sound in a way that feels almost physical.
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