The decline of religious affiliation (Office for National Statistics, 2022) and attendance (Duffy et al., 2023) in Britain has prompted scholarly interest into alternative modalities to foster meaning, belonging, fulfilment and self-actualisation. This paper explores musicking (Small, 1998), as a potential religio-spiritual surrogate fulfilling psychological and social needs traditionally met by religious and spiritual (R/S) practices. Musicking—listening, playing, composing, (i.e., engagement with music)—fosters community building (Weatherly, 2025) and affords emotional expression (Shäffer et al., 2013) and personal transformation (Hesser, 2001). Music has also been investigated as a social surrogate (Schäfer & Eerola, 2018; Schäfer et al., 2020), promoting empathy and reducing feelings of loneliness. This theoretical paper examines the shared affordances of musicking and R/S experiences, arguing that while musicking does not replace religion/spirituality, it can provide similar experiential and communal functions. Both domains contribute to individual and collective wellbeing, emphasising the roles of social cohesion and meaning making. Notably, musicking can also facilitate states of trance (Becker, 1994), flow (Wrigley & Emmerson, 2013) and transcendence (Gabrielsson, 2011), mirroring those religious rituals and spiritual encounters. These phenomena underscore the capacity of music to elicit altered states of consciousness, evoke profound emotional responses, and engender a sense of the sacred in secular contexts. By analysing the intersections between musicking and R/S engagement, this paper highlights music’s role in fostering belonging, meaning-making and emotional catharsis in a society experiencing religious decline. While avoiding claims of substitution, this work contributes to the broader discourse on the evolving landscape of spiritual experience in secular societies, positioning musicking as an important site for contemporary existential and communal fulfilment. Future empirical research is recommended to further explore the extent and nature of music’s role as a religio-spiritual surrogate.
Video game music (VGM) is a popular element of video games that is engaged with outside of gameplay. However, motivations for engaging with VGM are unclear. This paper theoretically postulates that listeners engage with VGM to ‘re-experience’ immersion into the narrative worlds of video games, and the related emotions that are a fundamental constituent of the experience. It is firstly argued that narrative immersion (Nilsson et al., 2016) in video games is facilitated by functions and characteristics of VGM – namely the use of repetition across game states, character actions, and thematic development – that in turn contribute to an embodied gameplay experience (Collins, 2013). Secondly, this paper proposes that listening to VGM outside of gameplay can result in listeners ‘re-experiencing’ this narrative immersion through mechanisms of embodied cognition (including mental simulation and memory), involving reenactments of perceptual, motor and affective states present during gameplay (Barsalou, 2008). Finally it is suggested that experience of narrative immersion through VGM listening is a key emotion induction pathway for listeners, involving key psychological mechanisms of music emotion (Juslin, 2013; Scherer & Coutinho, 2013), including episodic memory, visual imagery, and empathy. A theoretical framework of VGM listening, emotion and immersion will be presented, with suggestions for future empirical research, and predictions regarding the kinds of emotions induced through VGM engagement, and the important role of VGM and video game style or genre.
A Bayesian model of emotion in music (BEiMM) is proposed that offers a significant advancement over the traditional cues-based lens-model of musical communication and a proof of concept is offered using a cross-cultural comparative study of perceived emotion in Western Classical and North American Jazz excerpts. The model uses Bayes’ rule to predict perceived emotion in music from the product of emotion concepts and expected relations between musical cues and emotion dimensions, moderated by characteristics of the musical genre. This approach acknowledges the active role of listeners in making sense of music and affective responses, and the variations in concepts listeners may hold in relation to emotions and their role in music. A proof of concept is offered by confirming significant variations in emotion concepts and in perception of emotions in music between Japanese and UK younger and older adults, and by demonstrating the ability of BEiMM to predict perceived emotion in music. The findings highlight the important role of listeners’ beliefs about emotions in music, which has so far been disregarded in cross-cultural studies. Implications relate to the need to update how we model and understand emotions in music, including in applied contexts such as pedagogy, therapy and music performance.
A team of researchers at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford are studying how musical experiences might impact the ways we think and feel about the natural world, and they’re focusing a part of their project on Scottish folk/classical musician Erland Cooper's solo work. The team are looking for listeners to take part in a survey about their experiences with Erland’s music. If you’d like to find out more, visit the project page through the University of Sheffield.
With MusEnv, our core aim is to increase knowledge about how contemporary popular music contributes to biospheric values and environmental attitudes and behaviours. We combine empirical research methods from psychology and sociology with theoretical and analytical approaches from arts and humanities scholarship to produce evidence-based, interdisciplinary outputs. Our research is generously funded by Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) via UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Research England.
This study investigates how perceptions of emotions are altered by the presence of two important characteristics in ambient music used for focus and relaxation: binaural beats and ambisonics. Binaural beats are audio illusions that have been shown to produce effect of theta-brain waves and linked to increases in cogintive procesess. Ambisonics are engineering techniques used to control the dimensionality of music sources in compositions. Together these treatments of the music represent compositional technqies and music used by music studios to produce music for relaxation and cognitive enhacement. Through investigating the emotional perceptions of music with these techniques, we test the effects of them for the music listener.
Awe is a difficult emotion to describe well, but many of us have experienced this feeling of sublime wonder through an aesthetic reaction to music. This research seeks to better understand the components and processes by which we experience awe from music by evaluating psychological appraisals models through empirical testing.
Emotionally laden music may produce feelings of awe due to connections with social environments and personal connections. This research project branches away from these social associations and focuses on detailing and analysing perceptual, ecological, and musical features found in participant-reported musical excerpts to examine the emotionally affective elements present within the music itself.
Using participant responses about experiences of musical awe, a corpus of music was constructed that reflects that data. This collection of music was analysed through MIRtoolbox for its musical and sonic features. Roughness, mel frequency cepstral coefficients, dynamics, tempo, regularity, and more were assessed to find commonalities between the samples of music associated with awe.
It has been hypothesised that a prime component for the experience of awe comes from an encounter with something truly vast. What does size mean within a musical context and what is its relations to spatialisation? Sonic and musical elements were associated with participant judgements of music's 'virtual size'. Correlations between the strength of these size perceptions and key musical features were drawn to ascertain their relationship.
AI-generate images seeded from the project title, app.wombo.art
This study investigates how participants’ ideas of their personal identity have been influenced by strong, autobiographically salient musical experiences from their youth in relation to the significance that the same music currently bears in those same terms of identity. An online questionnaire and interview examines how people describe musical experiences from their ‘youth’ that seemed autobiographically significant at the time; reflect on that experience in hindsight; consider how their attitudes to that music have (or have not) changed since then; and summarise the current importance (or lack thereof) that this music has in their lives, specifically in terms of their sense of who they are/who they have become.