How do aesthetics get into muscles and muscles into aesthetics? Insights from musical interactions in an experimental context

In certain contexts, processes of perception, action and skill development and those related to aesthetic experiences can have mutual influence upon each other. Concepts from the domains of ecological psychology and aesthetics may therefore be distinct but entangled. These entanglements are explored here through observations from an experiment in which musicians’ behaviours and experiences were recorded while they interacted with a computer music controller instrument operating different modes of sound synthesis. Processes of action-perception exploration and enacting the instrument’s various affordances had an impact upon the musicians’ aesthetic judgements about the instrument, and their imagining its virtual potential for application in music cultural practices. Conversely, musicians’ prior experience in different aesthetic cultures constrained the affordances of the instrument that were discovered and taken up by them. These insights are used to expand upon the different ways that perceptual-motor and social aesthetic processes can constrain and shape each other. Ongoing and further directions for both theoretical and empirical research are highlighted.