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that music is a distraction or a way of masking other more noxious sounds? And if musical regularities do play an active role in physical entrainment, just what are the mechanisms through which environmental regularities come to be related to, and indeed foster, bodily regularities? Finally, what is the nature of the body–environment relationship? For example, do musical-environmental regularities simply ‘cause’ bodily e ects? Is the realm of the corporeal, particularly at this very early and uncultured stage of life, therefore an exception to the argument that has been made in the previous three chapters against a ‘stimulus’ model of music’s e ects?

In answer to this last question, no. There is no reason why a perspective devoted to human–music interaction, to the reflexive appropriation of musical materials for the constitution and regulation of agency, does not also apply to the matter of embodied agency and its constitution, to the organization of the corporeal, at any stage of the life-cycle. True, such an application may require rethinking conventional notions of sentience and intentionality (an infant does not exercise the same type and degree of aesthetic reflexivity demonstrated, for example, by Lucy in the previous chapter), but this need not imply an infant who is a ected by (but does not interact with) the materials that surround him or her. Indeed, speculation on the issue of infant–environment interaction provides a starting point for an elaboration of an area within the human sciences that is as promising as it is somewhat sketchy – the ‘tacit’ or nonpropositional, non-discursive forms of awareness and action.

Embodied awareness and embodied security

The literature on neonatology suggests that the auditory environment of the neonatal intensive care unit does not a ord entrainment. A neonate’s situation is perhaps akin to that of someone attempting to skip rope who encounters an arhythmically turned rope. Without being able to locate some kind of rhythmic regularity (the pace, as discussed above, is normally set by the jumping chants, sung by the rope twirlers), entrainment is impeded. Instead, one must react to each and every fall of the rope, instant upon instant; a ‘routinizable’ relationship with the environment is not possible since at no level of awareness can one establish a sense of what will happen next. The environment thus produces insecurity, albeit not necessarily recognized as such consciously; it is constantly startling; it does not provide a ground against which one may, with whatever degree of consciousness, regulate self or body. Again, this is the problem discussed above in relation to Gary and Mandy. One cannot locate and employ as resources environmental patterns. These comparisons,

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between the phenomenological situation of the neonate and the rope skipper are, needless to say, highly speculative, but they are none the less heuristic; they are useful as a way of beginning to explore the biopragmatic embodied features of human being at all stages of the life course. This point requires development.

The notion of how one locates or tunes in to environmental properties and how this may have consequences for embodied agency is crucial to any understanding of how music works as an organizing device of the body, how it facilitates ‘embodied awareness’. By this term (‘embodied awareness’) I mean a non-propositional, non-cognitive, creaturely orientation and expectancy towards the physical environment. All of us are bodily aware as we organize our actions and behaviour, for example, in our response to water (as something to drink or to be avoided in order to remain dry), ice underfoot, cli faces, or sunlight versus shade. This kind of awareness is part of what we casually refer to as ‘common sense’, ‘horse sense’ and so on. Our capacity for this ‘sense’ is something we share – to some degree – with other species, as for example when we recognize the cat stretching out on a sunny step, the sheep who avoids a cli edge, the cattle who avoid electric fences, the caribou who flee when they sense impending danger and so forth. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that animals are aware of and orient to the sonic environment. Traditionally, for example, Scottish Highland milking songs and rhythmic ‘charms’ had their place in the cow-byre, where they were thought to increase milk yield, and there are numerous references to music’s use for this purpose today. If anything, music’s use in the service of animal welfare and/or agricultural productivity seems to be undergoing reappraisal among researchers. For example, a 1998 study, conducted by the National Farmers’ Union and the Roslin Institute of the University of Edinburgh concluded that ‘playing the radio to chickens is an easy practicable way of enriching their environment and, perhaps, of helping to reduce their fear of new noises’ ( Jones and Rayner 1999). (Such a practice might, however, also mask the sounds of animals in distress.)

Bodily awareness of environmental properties would appear to be a pragmatic, semi-conscious, matter. It need not involve any reflection or articulation as propositional ‘knowledge’, though at times it also may do so. For example, those who are able to walk – or walk on a slippery surface

– need not think or talk about the physics or physiology of how walking is accomplished and yet they may produce walking as a matter of course. Beings of di erent kinds thus orient to and organize themselves in relation to environmental properties – for example, the waking–sleep cycle may come to be mapped on to the cycles of daylight and darkness. In this

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way, environmental patterns come to a ord patterns of embodiment and behaviour through the ways they are responded to as entrainment devices.

Music and bodily security

We are now at the point where it is possible to begin to address the question of music’s mechanisms of operation, how music may be understood to a ord bodily entrainment. I suggest that the creaturely ability to locate and anticipate environmental features engenders a kind of corporeal or embodied security, by which I mean the ‘fitting in’ or attunement with environmental patterns, fostered by a being’s embodied awareness of the materials and properties that characterize his or her environment. Embodied insecurity, by contrast, is what happens when one is unable to locate and appropriate such materials, when, like the jump roper, the distressed neonate, or the music therapy clients described above, one is unable to locate resources with or against which to ‘gather oneself’ into some kind of organized and stable state. Embodied security involves one’s ability to fit in, or situate oneself, bodily, with an ergonomic environment.

This fitting in is fostered by embodied awareness of the patterns and textures that are to be found in an environment and the opportunities these a ord for embodied security, for finding some kind of synchronous connection with an environment. Consider the example of how an infant learns to take nourishment. In order to feed, he or she must ‘latch’ on to, appropriate, a nipple. An infant’s location of the ‘right’ thing to latch on to for this purpose may involve some trial and error. In light of this locating or appropriation, infants (and animals) may have a similar capacity for embodied awareness of other environmental regularities, including auditory regularities, and that they may come to latch on to these, rather as they do to the material devices of nourishment. With regard to both kinds of latching, a way (note, not necessarily the way) is found of synchronizing body with environment; the body and its processes must be articulated with some properties a orded by materials that lie outside it. It is in and through this approximation process that music comes to have e ects upon the body, to function as an entrainment device for bodily processes and embodied conduct.

In music, pattern is engendered through regularized relationships between tensions and resolutions, sounds and silences (in Western tonal music through harmony, melody, texture, timbre), and rhythmic arrangements over time that a ord expectancy. It seems likely that, for neonates, as for adult humans, latching on to aspects of an auditory environment is a orded by – among other things – perceptible sonic patterns (significant

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patterns for cultured humans), as found in music and in many other soundscapes – diurnal, cyclical and so forth. (Indeed, feeding is itself a rhythmic activity, one in which baby and mother are entrained.) Moreover, it must be remembered that music is a physical medium, that it consists of sound waves, vibrations that the body may feel even when it cannot hear. The aural is never distinct from the tactile as a sensuous domain.

If music a ords a kind of auditory device on to which one can latch in some way or other, in relation to some or other bodily activity or process, then it is a resource for the constitution of embodied security and its properties may a ord such security. Just as a feeding event may be structured to encourage or a ord latching on to nipple or bottle – upon which feeding is dependent – so, too, a music therapist may structure the environment so that it a ords latching on to environmental recurrences – upon which entrainment is dependent. For example, in the case of Baby B, described above, the music used was the ‘Transitions’ tape, from Placenta Music Inc., an actual recording of the ‘intrauterine symphony’ overlaid with other sounds.

As an aside, most of the music used so far with neonates has featured gentle rhythm and soothing, low-energy materials. It is interesting to speculate, however, about how ‘heavy metal’ or serial music would work in relation to neonatal state organization! By way of comparison, heavy metal and jazz were viewed, by the poultry farmers surveyed by Jones and Rayner, to be less e ective in the henhouse than chart and easy-listening music – as the authors note, the next step in testing this issue involves allowing the birds an ‘opportunity to “switch [music] on and o ”’ ( Jones and Rayner 1999). There are, it would appear, certain cultural assumptions about what is appropriate within these settings that are at work in shaping the musical choices made.

Music has long been used for similar purposes by parents in the form of lullabies, quieting songs and the like (Unyk et al. 1992). Thinking in this way of what the auditory environment may a ord for embodied awareness, and for latching, entrainment and its a liate, embodied security, brings us somewhat closer to unpacking Raymond Williams’s intriguing and oft-quoted statement:

rhythm is a way of transmitting a description of experience, in such a way that the experience is re-created in the person receiving it, not merely as an ‘abstraction’ or an emotion but as a physical e ect on the organism – on the blood, on the breathing, on the physical patterns of the brain. We use rhythm for many ordinary purposes, but the arts . . . comprise highly developed and exceptionally powerful rhythmic means, by which the communication of experience is actually achieved

. . . the dance of the body, the movements of the voice, the sounds of instruments