It is very much connected to the social psychology of experience. This book is written for advanced undergraduate, masters and doctoral students in social psychology.

Savage et al. do an excellent job of making the case for social bonding in general, but do a less good job of distinguishing the manners by which dance and music achieve this. It is important to see dance and music as two parallel and interactive mechanisms that employ the “group body” and “group voice,” respectively, in engendering social cohesion.

The perpetual music track is a new concept that describes a condition of constant or near-constant musical imagery. This condition appears to be very rare even among composers and musicians. I present here a detailed self-analysis of musical imagery for the purpose of defining the psychological features of a perpetual music track. I have music running through my head almost constantly during waking hours, consisting of a combination of recently- heard pieces and distant pieces that spontaneously pop into the head. (...) Imagery consists mainly of short musical fragments that get looped repeatedly upon themselves. Corporeal manifestations of imagery occur in the form of unconscious finger movements whose patterns correspond to the melodic contour of the imagined piece. Musical dreams occur every week or two, and contain a combination of familiar and originally- composed music. These results are discussed in light of theories of imagery, consciousness, hallucination, obsessive cognition, and most especially the notion that acoustic consciousness can be split into multiple parallel streams. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology depends upon a particular and limited set of related methodologies, which assume not merely abilities and results on the part of phenomenologists which have been severely criticized, but more profoundly, that mental contents are atomistic and independently manipulable. I will show not only that this assumption is mistaken and that questioning it undermines traditional phenomenological method, but that it leads to a paradox when turned upon itself which forces the rejection of a purely Husserlian phenomenology. More generally, any (...) theory whose data is confined to the results of particular and limited methodologies is by that fact unable to investigate those methodologies, and is thus at best only able to function in a severely restricted realm. (shrink)

This paper is a comparative study of the accounts of the goddess Venus in the Genealogia of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) and the Mythologiae of Natale Conti (1520?-1382?). Conti's superior knowledge of Greek, access to Greek sources unknown or incomprehensible to Boccaccio, easily accessible Latin prose style, and exceptional organizational skills, enabled him to create a richer, more extensive, and more accurate account of the goddess than Boccaccio could provide. Both Boccaccio and Conti escape from the binary, antithetical understanding of Venus (...) that dominated medieval commentary. Conti focuses on the paradox of a beautiful goddess representing ugly things; Boccaccio's organizational scheme (based on a flawed genealogical chart originating with the supposed god Demogorgon) makes for a more disparate approach to symbolic interpretation, interesting in parts but thematically unfocused. (shrink)