How does music arouse emotions? The enactive charater of musical experience versus Peter Kivy's enhanced formalism

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between music and emotion by contrasting two influential contemporary philosophical approaches: Peter Kivy’s refined formalism and Joel Krueger’s enactivism. Whereas Kivy argues that music expresses emotion solely through its formal features—such as melody and rhythm—without involving genuinely embodied affective states, Krueger contends that musical listening is a situated and embodied activity, wherein listeners actively regulate their affective states through immersive engagement with the sonic environment. The primary aim of the article is to offer a systematic reconstruction of Krueger’s enactivist account of affective musical experience, with particular emphasis on the concepts of extended emotion and affective atmospheres. Although these notions are not fully elaborated in Krueger’s own writings, they are crucial for grasping the broader implications of his proposal. It is argued that, from an enactivist perspective, music should not be viewed as a passive object of aesthetic appreciation, but rather as an interactive field that facilitates the co-production of affective experience. Emotions, on this account, are not internal mental states but embodied and distributed processes that emerge from sensorimotor practices embedded in meaningful contexts. The article concludes that the enactivist framework offers a significant theoretical contribution by conceiving music as a medium through which affective ways of being in the world are constituted.