Music and Movement

Music and Movement: Expectations, Aesthetics, and Representation
Oxford Handbooks Online

Music and Movement: Expectations, Aesthetics, and
Representation
Jay Schulkin
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body
Edited by Youn Kim and Sander Gilman
Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Jul 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190636234.013.15
Abstract and Keywords
Music and movement go together in every human society: “music to my feet,” as it were.
The human condition, particularly human emotional expression, is linked to music.
Indeed, movement and a sense of time are intimately connected, and the brain is
prepared to detect movement, both familiar and unfamiliar. Our sense of self is tied to
movement. Aesthetic sense is a feature of the way we come prepared to interpret the
world. Such aesthetics are historically variable and rich when the ecological conditions
are suitable. Aesthetic judgment reflects our cognitive flexibility, and our extension and
use of specific cognitive mechanisms to widen domains of human expression. Music
evolved in the context of social contact and meaning. Music continues to allow us to
reach out to others and expand our human experience toward and with others. This
process began with sounds and expanded into song and instrumental music.
Keywords: music, movement, human, society, aesthetic, cognition, sound, expectation
Introduction
Grappling with the unexpected while sustaining the familiar is a core feature that
underlies human experience and inquiry in general, but which, in part, is closely tied to
discussions of musical sensibilities. Leonard Meyer, the great twentieth-century music
theorist, focused on the interplay of the familiar and the unfamiliar in musical
experiences and musical meaning. Music is no different than problem-solving and
statistical inference, as it is probabilistic and anticipatory; unconscious inferences,
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expectations, and the generation of habits underlie the perception and production of
musical experiences.
Cognitive anticipatory expectations stand out when one considers the close link between
music and dance. Music and dance evolved in the context of social contact and meaning.
The human condition is linked to music and dance, and the range of human emotional
expression is fundamental in this regard. Music allows us to reach out to others and
expand our human experience toward and with others. This process began with song and
was expanded through instruments and dance. Music and movement go together in every
human society: “music to my feet,” as it were. Indeed, this sense of aesthetics is a feature
of the way we come prepared to interpret the world. The brain is prepared to detect
movement and rhythm, both familiar and unfamiliar, with aesthetic judgment reflecting
our cognitive flexibility.
This chapter begins by discussing the interplay of the familiar and unfamiliar, variation
amid repetition, in musical expectations and experience. Next, the probabilistic and the
anticipatory in musical aesthetic sensibility and emotional experience is presented in the
context of a neural structure oriented toward adaptation and change. Art and the
aesthetic judgment of both music and movement are then explored in the context of
human representation. Music and movement are also linked to rhythmic generators and
internal perceptions of time that underlie the cognitive formation of expectations. Next,
the coevolution of music and dance amid human connection, communication, and culture
is examined. Finally, music and dance are presented as expressions rich in lived and
shared experience, manifestations of meaning and cognitive predilections.
Musical Expectations: Familiarity and Variation

A vast array of human pleasures underlies musical experience (Huron 2005; Merker
2005). Feelings of pleasure are, in many contexts, linked to familiarity. We enjoy the
familiar; it is reassuring. With music, we listen to a song over and over; the familiar
reassuring as we embrace something from the past, explore, and find something new. Our
cognitive capabilities and generative creativity allow us to experience enjoyment in the
music, to derive pleasure from the familiar and at the same time to take comfort in it as
we explore interesting features; we can also simply enjoy the sensory state. Exposure
tends to evoke enhanced preference for that to which one has been exposed, or with
which one is already familiar (e.g., “oldies” music, comfort food, or a known and loved
person).
Musical pleasure includes a capacity to prepare our mind to hear sound amid conceptual/
auditory coherence, endless beauty in audition, and deep social symbolic meanings. We
come prepared with biological prepotent neural structures to the allure of the auditory, to
the musical, to song and sound rich in meaning, through which we are compelled to
complete and fulfill expectations and experience pleasure (Vuust and Kringelbach 2010;
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Huron 2005). Music is inherently familiar to us, even if it contains some unpredictable
elements. This could play a role in why it is pleasurable to us. It is like eating variations of
mom’s chicken soup—maybe a bit surprising, but always comforting and delightful.
Leonard Meyer focused on the interplay of the familiar and the unfamiliar in musical
experiences and musical meaning. In describing music, Meyer noted, “underlying the
reciprocity of play, regularity, and style, is in part the patterns of repetition” (1956, 72;
see also Meyer 1967). The repetition of the familiar is of course part of the experience of
music. Indonesian gamelan bands, for example, depend on the repetition of an already-
familiar musical motif with minor tone variations in some form of endless, repetitive,
“eternal recurrence,” to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche (1927).
Meyer also pointed out that music depends on the contrast between the familiar and its
variations. Variation at multiple levels of appraisal is a feature of most musical
experiences. Both Mozart and Coltrane, for instance, delighted in slight deviations in
expectations pervading the familiar. John Coltrane’s recording of the song “My Favorite
Things,” written by Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers for The Sound of Music,
relies on the audience’s familiarity with the song to launch into magnificent variations,
expected and unexpected, as he expands into novel uncharted territory.
We have a wide variety of musical expectations that range, as David Huron (2008) notes,
from pitch proximity to the direction of the music. He ties this organizational sensibility
to “heuristic listening.” Scale tones set up diverse expectations amid surprises and
“sweet anticipation.” Indeed,
some surprises start right from the moment a work begins. When Igor Stravinsky
began his “Rite of Spring” with a solo bassoon, he violated several well-known
conventions in classical music. The vast majority of Western orchestral works do
not begin with a solo. Moreover, the bassoon is one of the least likely orchestral
instruments to perform by itself. Finally, Stravinsky placed the instrument at the
very top of its range. In other words, Stravinsky began the “Rite of Spring” in a
highly unorthodox (that is, improbable) way.
(Huron 2006, 270)
That shock of unexpectedness mimics the way the season of spring itself surprises us
after the cold of winter.
Surprise and tension underlie human experience, but they take new and extraordinary
forms in music (Meyer 1973). Indeed, such events pervade the sense of musical
experience (Cuddy and Lunney 2005; Russo and Cuddy 1999; Narmour 1991). Consider,
for instance, the expectations we have concerning melodic intervals (Thompson, Cuddy,
and Plaus 1997). Neural capabilities underlie diverse forms of human expression, and
predictability is a core feature of the brain’s responses to rhythmic expectations (Vuust et
al. 2009).
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Indeed, expectations are a core feature of neural organization. Repetition is essential in

habit formation (Peirce 1992; Dewey 1929), and small deviations underlie responses to
even the smallest novelties. These factors operate in music as well as in daily life
(Narmour 2008; Rozin 1976). Expectations underlie a pattern itself, and are indeed part
of the pattern. A common pattern in Western music (and also Western humor) is the
repetition of two similar phrases followed by a dissimilar event, the A-B-A-B-C pattern
(Rozin et al. 2006). Thus, a break in expectation is part of sustaining coherence (Narmour
2008).
Meyer understood that melodies are often acting on more than one level, in which there
is the familiar and the unexpected. We are anchored to frames of reference in which there
are expectations, detection of deviations or gaps, and then exploration. Continuity,
building on the insights of C. S. Peirce (1868), is a primary feature of expectations
situated in a cultural and contextual milieu, within a “cultural style” (Meyer 1956). We
forge coherence by relying on the familiar amid the unfamiliar, and it is this relationship
that permeates much of our experience in music, and indeed in most avenues of human
expression.
Musical Expectations: Probability, Emotion,

and Aesthetic Sensibilities
Meyer was anchored in classical pragmatism, and he placed music and its appreciation in
the broader arena of problem solving, exploring the probabilistic and the anticipatory in
human musical sensibility. Underlying such exploration is statistical inference within
frameworks of expectations rich in meaning, problem-solving, and neural investment.
Statistics are embedded in practices in which reliability and predictive patterns are
depended on and noticed when they break down (Goodman 1955). This view underlies
reasoning about musical expectation, and to some extent about art more generally, in
which a mixture of expectation and discrepancy is held to underlie aesthetic sensibility
(Goodman 1968; Dewey 1934). The mental tools used in statistical reasoning also
underlie diverse forms of musical competence, replete within a social context. They
permeate the cogitative processes involved in listening to music, and motivate our
response to violations of musical rules (Huron 2008; Juslin 2001; Smith and Melara 1990;
Meyer 1956).
Probability judgments to assess the condition of uncertainty are at the heart of human
reasoning, and while it is a mistake to exaggerate their role in aesthetic judgment, one
can assume that in some contexts they do play a role. Since uncertainty is a basic feature
of our existence, we have developed a variety of resources to cope with it. Moreover, as
Meyer has noted, “uncertainty is anathema to humankind,” and “we devise ways of
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reducing uncertainty both in the out-there world and in our personal lives,” but “in the
arts and other playful activities such as sports, games and gambling we actually relish
and cultivate a considerable amount of uncertainty” (2001, 352; see also Krumhansl
2002).
The play of ideas amid the uncertainty of one’s existential condition defines an aesthetics
in which probability expectations are part of our everyday cognitive adaptation, in music
or otherwise (Dewey 1929). The codification of well-worn habits and expectations is the
grounding frame in which musical orientation takes place; it requires well-orchestrated
habits, cognitively mediated in regions of the brain that underlie repetitive occurrences
and their breakdown.
Cognitive systems underlie all aspects of music and aesthetic sensibility (Temperley 2001;
Sloboda 2000). Cognition is often construed as detached, and since emotions are
anything but detached, they are considered noncognitive by many investigators. Aesthetic
experience is surely up close and personal, and therefore one can understand why many
investigators construe the aesthetic experience as not “exclusively cognitive” (Elster
2000). However, aesthetics is linked to information-processing systems in the brain.
Aesthetic appreciation is replete with information processing; it is not as if one side of us
is doing the thinking and another is only appreciating (Kivy 2001, 1991; Davies 1994).
Adaptation is a core feature of musical sensibility (Cross 2010; Huron 2006); the
biological systems are tied to auditory acuity and the prediction of auditory events.
Appraisal systems in musical pleasure and displeasure are embedded in the auditory
system analysis and the larger connectivity in neural systems. Infused within are diverse
forms of learning, rich in semiotics (Meyer 1973; Dewey 1929). Neural capabilities
underlie musical sensibilities amid a sense of problem solving and detection; the broader
theme is the creation process (Sloboda 2000). Moreover, as Dewey understood, in art and
experience, problem-solving is endemic to aesthetics. Music is no different; unconscious
inferences, expectations, and the generation of habits underlie the perception and
production of musical experiences.
Something inherent in Darwin, who did not acknowledge a separation of cognitive

systems from emotional systems, is of course the view of Meyer, and certainly Dewey, that
emotional responses are embedded in diverse forms of information-processing neural
systems. Indeed, John A. Sloboda, a psychologist who studies musical sensibility, has
commented on Meyer’s work regarding emotion: “emotion is intimately linked to the
cognitive processes of generating and testing predictions about future musical
events” (Sloboda 2008, 489). Violations of expectations are one reliable feature linked to
emotions, and while Meyer had doubts about the accuracy of the emotions in music,
physical embodiment is embedded in these expectations and their violation in musical
appreciation.
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It has been found that the greater the deviation from expectations about the music’s
harmonic characteristics, the greater the emotional response (Steinbeis, Koelsch, and
Sloboda 2006). That is, neural systems come prepared to recognize harmonic
relationships, syntactically organized in the diverse semantic meanings expressed in
music; deviations result in greater and more diverse neural responses. The attention here
becomes focused when encountering something that stands out as discrepant. Our
curiosity is piqued; beholding an aesthetically pleasing or offensive object, our interest is
aroused, our sensibility offended (Hebb 1949). Expectancy in information processing in
the brain permeates and results in what Karl Lashley called “the serial order of
behavior” (1951).
Dewey’s view of learning, whether aesthetic or otherwise, is one in which the failure of an
expectation initiates the process of learning, a cognitive behaviorism (1925). This view of
aesthetics is explicated, for example, in Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), in
which the discrepancy model of learning figures throughout, as well as in the conflict
theory of human appraisals and meaning (see also, Meyer 1973, 1967). In the discrepancy
model, disruptions of expected events result in the recruitment of a greater number of
behaviors that might reflect learning. Functionalist and cognitivist views place the
behavior patterns that are generated by a central state of the brain in the context of
acquiring information, which has been consistently linked to the context of musical
sensibility (Huron 2005; Sloboda 2000; Meyer 1973; Berylne 1960).
Musical sensibilities exist amid the information-processing systems in the brain that
underlie perception and are oriented to novelty, familiarity, and syntax. We are curious for
a lot of reasons, and there is no doubt that one of these reasons is informational
discrepancy in an event (Loewenstein and Lerner 2003). Discrepancy (or novelty)
detection is a core motivator of brain processing in both musicians and nonmusicians
(Koelsch et al. 2000), and the recognition of musical discrepancy is expressed early in
development. Expectancy effects permeate the organization of the brain and are linked to
appraisal systems for gains and losses; the events are embedded in information
processing. A broad-based response to discrepancy is an important behavioral adaptation,
underlying aesthetic sensibility.
Novelty detectors are operative across the human experience, and in a number of regions
of the human brain. Several areas of the brain, including the amygdala, the basal ganglia,
and regions of the prefrontal cortex, as well as Broca’s area and its analogue in the right
hemisphere, are importantly involved in some forms of aesthetic judgment as well as the
detection of discrepancies. Moreover, activation of the left prefrontal cortex is linked to
music that generates feelings of joy and happiness, while activation of the right prefrontal
cortex is linked to music that generates feelings of fear or sadness (Schmidt and Trainor
2001).
Aesthetic sensibility is much broader than simply the detection of discrepancy and the
appreciation of filling in the information that is needed. Sensing the syntactical and
informational content of the aesthetic object is also important for aesthetic appreciation.
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While expectations linked to probability judgments are only part of the story for musical
aesthetic appreciation, they still seem to be elements of the musical feel for phenomena,
which requires a number of information-processing systems (Repp 2005). The sense of
musical expectations is embedded in appraisal systems, replete with emotions (Huron
2008; Gjerdingen 2007; Sloboda 1991; Meyer 1973).
Musical sensibility involves a neural structure oriented toward change. The sense of
change is what underlies the appreciation of knowledge in music and adaptation; the
sense of uncertainty is part of the interplay of the regularity of the expected with a
deviation, however slight, that keeps our interest. Such is the structure of musical
expectation, amid style and form; staying the same, alternatively, is surely not a feature of
many musical forms, although variation within set parameters is a recurrent musical
feature. Expectations and variations are thus common themes for which musical structure
sets the conditions for diverse expression.
Music and Movement: Art and Aesthetics in the

Context of Human Representation
Aesthetic judgment is a profound part of our life. We do not just view a masterfully
rendered painting with awe. We value a person’s character as a work of beauty, a
beautiful soul; we enjoy the aesthetic contrast of orange carrots and green peas on our
dinner plates; a majestic mountain glimpsed through a car window renders us speechless
as it comes into view. Aesthetics is pervasive in everyday life; it is not just for the
museum, parlor, or theater. Music, like other arts, can heighten and deepen our
experience.
John Dewey, in his book Art as Experience (1934), stated romantically, “because
experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world
of things, it is art in germ. Even in its rudimentary forms, it contains the promise of that
delightful perception which is aesthetic experience” (18). Dewey was fond of linking
human activity with common threads: aesthetic experiences, problem solving, and a
common currency. Art infuses life, and there is no higher or lower art. Folk music can be
as elegant as Mozart, and as moving.
The work of Doris Humphrey, a twentieth-century modern dancer, in Art of Making

Dances ([1959] 1991) for example, suggests that aesthetic sensibility evolved because
elegant classificatory cognitive systems are adaptive (Rozin 1976). We come prepared
with a variety of cognitive systems, information processing, inferential mechanisms, and
representational capacities for depicting and making sense of the objects that we are
likely to encounter (Dunbar 1998; Rozin 1998, 1976). These systems pervade our
experiences and help determine how we interpret and predict events. They also underlie
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our problem-solving proclivities that reach into aesthetic judgment (Cross 2009; Huron
2008).
Representation of objects is an ancient human activity, and we come prepared to

understand objects in our environments. Cave art is but one example of this phenomenon
that we find across cultures (Mithen 1996). The desire to represent and understand the
objects in our world is a fundamental human motivation. This orientation is embedded in
practice, in action, in movement or dance, and in music (Peirce 1992; Hanson 1971,
1958). Such a predilection is wired in our minds/brains (Ramachandran and Hirstein
1999; Zeki, Watson, and Frackoiak 1993). Aesthetic judgment is part of our appraisal of
ourselves and of others, and is about both what is attractive and what we are trying to
understand. It represents the objects we eat, copy, capture, and try to control (Mithen
1996).
Kant ([1792] 1951) tied aesthetic judgment to a “free play of the imagination,” of
cognitive capacities and faculties interacting to determine the perception of beauty or the
sublime. Kant and the free play of the imagination set the stage for the “mind to think [of]
the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of ideas” (151). In Kant’s lofty
terms, the construction of aesthetics, musical or otherwise, pushes one beyond what can
be represented and known toward a semblance of the sublime. This occurs through
embodied rituals amid an expanded sense of sensibility through play and practice, which
pervades our sense of music and movement or dance (Bellah 2011; Schulkin 2004;
Johnson 1987).
In Langer’s view (1957), information-processing systems are continuous with bodily

representation, and they reach their zenith in aesthetic sensibility or perception. But
feelings are part of the perceptual apparatus that underlies information processing. An
aesthetic appreciation emerges from trying to capture nature amid cognitive sensibility,
tied to adaptation and aesthetic judgment, and intimately linked to bodily sensibility
(Budd 2002; Mithen 1996). Perhaps music, often construed as one of the more abstract
forms of representation, demonstrates this core cognitive capacity to reach beyond sheer
beauty and the sensuous to the sublime and a free play of cognitive capabilities.
In experiments, Sarah, a chimpanzee with extensive communication training, was shown

movement by humans that we would judge as graceful and aesthetically pleasing. She
was then shown what we would consider a more awkward movement in comparison. The
chimpanzee tended to look more at the graceful performance (Premack and Premack
1983). Perhaps form matters to the visual systems of the chimpanzee. But these effects in
Sarah are modest when compared to the aesthetic judgment of movement in a five-year-
old human child. Children in the same experiment express a specific and forceful
preference for the more graceful movement.
A sense of aesthetics is historically variable and rich when the ecological conditions are
suitable (Mithen 1996; Humphrey 1973). Aesthetic judgment reflects our cognitive
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flexibility and our extension and use of specific cognitive mechanisms to wide domains of
human expression (Rozin 1998, 1976; Mithen 1996).
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Music and Movement: Expectations, Rhythmic

Generators, and Internal Clocks
Rhythmic generators are a feature of cognitive systems and cephalic function across
music and virtually all human activities (Kruse 2007; Parrott and Schulkin 1993; Dipert
1983). In other words, anticipatory expectations are endemic to cognitive function,
musical or otherwise, and thus cognitive systems pervade musical activities. Therefore,
the distinction between the cognitive and the noncognitive is undercut at all levels of the
neural axis. Rhythmic expectations stand out when one considers the close link between
music and dance. Indeed, music and dance usually run together, pregnant with cognitive
anticipatory expectations. Consider the George M. Cohan song “I’m a Yankee Doodle
Dandy,” now mentally inseparable from the dancing of Jimmy Cagney, capturing a very
precise sense of place and history in dance and music.
Furthermore, movement is innately connected with a sense of time. Our brains are
primed to detect movement, both familiar and unfamiliar, and our perception of time and
self are tied to movement. The concept of a river of movement and time also reflects our
origins in water; after all, most of our body and our planetary bodies are composed of
water. The composer Claude Debussy’s “Water Pieces,” for instance, effectively captures
the great flux of existence, of movement, of feeling moved to sing, as well as fantasies of
singing and moving.
Clocks are linked to the prediction of periodicity as we cope with the world. The 24-hour
clock is just one of many: monthly, yearly, and seasonal. There is also the time sense that
can pervade our activities; whether we are aware of it or not, timing is endemic. Of
course, timing mechanisms pervade music when we are keeping time, tempo, and so on.
Time management and organization is also inherent in music, and entrained in aesthetics
more generally. Indeed, entrainment to predictive core features is at the heart of nature
and is tied to anticipation of events. Endogenous clocks like the 24-hour clock are used
biologically to anticipate events, such as when food or other vital resources are available
(Foster and Kreitzman 2004; Richter 1965), and clock-like mechanisms underlie the
tempo of music.
Cognitive systems bind us together and set the conditions for the organization of action in
a coherent but disruptive world; regularities are pervasive. The 24-hour rhythm is the
essential rotation of our behavior and is tied to light/dark cycles. This clock is so essential
that it is found in diverse regions of the body, such as the liver, as well as in regions of the
brain (Moore 1992; Richter 1965). Our many body clocks are pervasive in bodily rhythms,
and clocks in every organ regulate diverse information molecules such as dopamine and
vasopressin. However, it is the cephalic clocks (e.g., 24-hour clocks) that are tied to
music. These are the rhythms that we come prepared to perceive, entrain, and coordinate
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with, and with which we regulate ourselves in response to rhythmic patterns (Thaut
2003).
For a dancer, the rhythmic beat is at the heart of song. Naturally, the nervous system
itself is rich in rhythmic function (Richter 1965). The neuroscientist G. Buzsáki’s book
Rhythms of the Brain (2006) provides an excellent understanding of cognitive capability.
Inherent rhythmic properties ready the brain for action; there is relative rest, but not the
elimination of the inherent patterns of the neural system that underlie all cellular and
regulatory events. Indeed, evidence indicates that neural networks oscillate in functional
networks independent of external stimuli (Simmons and Martin 2012).
Thus, our bodies are full of all sorts of regulatory and innate clock-like rhythms, the most
obvious one of which is the palpable beat of the heart, but most of which are unknown
and undetected. In spite of this, they surely must figure into primitive rhythmic beating,
sounds, and eventually songs. These clocks are tied to the rhythms and the core themes
of nature as we forge coherence toward keeping time, tracking time, and organizing
ourselves with others by “keeping to the beat” internally, socially, and ecologically.
The Greek concept of the “harmony of the spheres” is merely one expression of a
sentiment that flows across diverse cultural experiences, and of the ecological rhythms of
events, internalized in diverse end organ systems, which are not simply passive. When it
comes to neurally generated rhythms, we become anticipatory and linked to others,
something essential for the sense and evolution of both music and language (Thomas
2001; Cook 1998; James 1993; Guthrie 1955).
Perhaps not surprisingly, our sense of motion, movement, and physical sensibility impacts
our sense of time and space. This means that there is a bodily component to our sense of
time and memory of events, which is rich in sensorimotor experiences, as well as agency
and action; the experiences of music are boundless with their sense of movement. As Eric
Clarke notes, “musical sound requires and inevitably involves movement” (2005).
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Music and Dance: Connection, Communication,

and Culture
Art is a vital source of communication, and it is therefore not surprising that rudimentary
forms of aesthetic appreciation may be expressed in a variety of species, and are
reflected in diverse neural structures (Brown et al. 2004; Geissman 2002; Marler 2000).
Art is a feature of the human condition, and all cultures have music and dance of some
sort (B. Nettl 1956; P. Nettl 1948). We are ultimately a social species. Music reinforced
our social instincts by allowing us to expand our human experience toward and with
others; coupled with the development of instruments for touching each other through
sound, our social expression continued to swell. This process began with song and was
expanded through instruments and dance. With culture and memory coded into external
artifacts, music and dance coevolved in contexts of adaptation, human meaning, and
social contact. The human condition is intimately linked to music and movement, which
are in turn fundamental for the range of human emotional expression.
Leaping with graceful ease, gesture fills the space of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, as
is immediately called to mind by those who know their work. They exemplify how we are
all physical in our singing, how our bodies swing to and fro to music. As Zbikowski notes,
“the connection between dance and music seems completely undeniable—Astaire and
Roger’s movements are simply the fanfare from Kern’s tune” (2012, 152). The gestures
are brimming, bristling and breezing, effortless and beautiful. The music is highlighted by
the dance and the dance is highlighted by the music. The dance completes the music, and
the music is embedded in the dance.
Suzanne Langer understood that movement and dance are at the heart of music, and
music is at the heart of movement (1953, 1957; see also: Bellah 2011; Schultz 1962).
Music and movement run together, just as cognitive systems are grounded in human
action, understanding, and what Meyer, following Dewey, understood as “embodied.”
There is no Cartesian separation of a mind in a body in our actual experience.
The cognitive architecture is in part revealed in action; the dance and the song revealing
gestures of cognitive structure (Zbikowski 2011). Indeed, music is tied to the organization
of movement in cognitive systems within the motor system and linked to different kinds of
information processing within the brain. Premotor planning and motor control are
inherent in this cephalic process (Gallese 2007) between the order of behavior and
expressed syntactical patterns of movements that are the products of generative
processes. A neuroscientific perspective on dance ties diverse regions of the basal
ganglia (e.g., putamen and diverse regions of the cortex, including the premotor and
motor cortex, and the cerebellum) in the organization of dance (Brown and Parsons
2008). We distinguish between animate and less animate movement, and animacy is a
core category in our cognitive arsenal for understanding the world.
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Music is infused with the extension of animacy and agency, two core categories that
underlie our sense of purpose, action, direction, and meaning. Expanding predilection in
activity is a primary feature in our creative sensibility in reaching to aesthetic sensibility
and perhaps the “neural sublime” (Richardson 2010), a capacity to search for the
unbounded amid the finite and bounded (Kant [1787] 1965).
Embedded in the narratives, of which poetry is a rhythmic example, is the rumination of

time as in “Burnt Norton” by T. S. Eliot (1943), in which the directions of time and the
“words move, music moves” in time. The poetry or the odes and rhythmic sensibility
inherent musically in Greek or Indian tales, to name just two, reflect the extension of
cephalic categories of understanding and representing (Trimble 2007; Cooke 1959). The
animate categories pervade the poetic seduction.
Poetry, like music, is less literal in general than language; of course, language
nevertheless is ripe with metaphors that expand our conceptual horizons (Lakoff and
Johnson 1999). Poetic metaphor is infused in the dances and movements and the stories.
As Doris Humphrey notes, “rhythm so permeates every aspect of a human being and
indeed of the known world that it might be compared to the ambience of existence, like
the water in which the fish moves” (Humphrey and Pollack [1959] 1991, 104).
Within this mixture of what Meyer (1967) called “an aesthetics of stability” is a coherence
of expansion into the unfamiliar and the expected. Metaphors within music expand our
sensibilities. Metaphor and myth run through musical thought, as they do in all of human
thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), through expression of mythic belief codified in
movement and music (Spitzer 2004; Lévi-Strauss 1969). Much of the infusion of creativity
in music and dance took place amid a moment of broader cultural change and
uncertainty. The aesthetic ascended to the sublime, but even the less sublime, everyday
manifestations of “singing in the rain, what a glorious day,” show us that music and dance
are a piece of our biology and an evolving part of our culture (Suskin 2010; Bordman
1992). What pervades is the recurrent familiar amid pockets of change and variation.
For instance, the stately Bill Robinson, an elegant man with endless dignity and grace
(Suskin 2010), danced with the little sweetheart of America, Shirley Temple, in the grips
of the Great Depression. African Americans in many parts of the country were not
supposed to touch or mingle with whites in this manner, but there they are, moving
through space, up and down a stairwell with elegant grace and genius, on cue together.
Dance is tied to our sociability. Without the ability to move together, music becomes far
less social. It is the sensation of “feeling the music” that really brings people together
around music (see Levi 1967; Mead 1938). Music is expressed across cultures and has
been with us, evolving for as long as we as a species have been here with instruments. It
follows that musical complexity is a feature of the larger cultural milieu (Burgess and
Haynes 2004).
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Music and Dance: Human Expression and Lived

Experience
A noted musical critic of the nineteenth century, Eduard Hanslick, stated, “the essence of
music is sound” in motion (cited in Clarke 2005, 4). Music and dance are endlessly
intertwined, and any history of dance is in part a history of music (Sachs 1937). Diverse
forms of life and ritual are expressed, and bodily rituals are a piece of nature, from the
dancing of the bees to the synchronous bodily and howling rituals of wolves (von Frisch
1955).
Dance is a phylogenetically ancient expression in which no separation exists between our

desire to move and our desire to reach into rich rituals of bodily expression. Ages in
music, like ages in dance, are cognitive and historical constructs (B. Nettl 2005, 1956;
Wiora 1965; Sachs 1937). But dance and ritual are linked in ages past and present in the
context of the larger cultural milieu. For instance, within dance, a place in St. Petersburg
was unique: an assembly called the Ballet Russe. There, Stravinsky, Fokine, and Ravel all
produced music that broke boundaries, coupled with the elegance of movement of
Nijinsky and Pavlova (Joseph 2011; Scheijen 2010; Taruskin 1996). The combination of
musical and dance talent produced an extraordinary explosion of creative energy. While
this assembly was unique in the breadth and quality of its output, these fusions are in fact
commonplace and suggest the fundamental link between music and dance.
Martha Graham, for instance, changed the landscape of modern dance paradoxically with
forms of ancient myths accompanying contemporary music. She produced a rich
landscape of pieces including Lamentation, Primitive Mysteries, American Mysteries,
Clytemnestra, Appalachian Spring, and Dark Meadow (see Morgan [1941] 1980). Diverse
composers, including Aaron Copland, captured Americana music for Graham and for
ballets. They were and are a wonder of breadth and depth. Copland was a senior
colleague and early mentor of Meyer, who writes about rhythm, melody, and harmony.
Copland himself produced a series of lectures (1957), which specifically note the link
between music and dance.
A wonderful chain in dance runs from Hana Holm to Isadora Duncan, and to Jose Limon
and Alvin Ailey, capturing diverse spirits of movement, music, and meaning (Siegel 1979).
For Ailey, capturing the African American experiences of spirituality was central to his
body of work, from pieces set to spirituals and church music, to the music of Ralph
Vaughn Williams in “The Lark Ascending.” The complicated and endlessly intricate
movements of the dances of India are also infused throughout with religious sensibility.
Religious dancers, as diverse as the Shakers and Whirling Dervishes, express the ecstasy
of movement and the simplicity of aesthetic ascendance through movement and dance;
the song matches the movement. These expanding categories of understanding, always
Page 14 of 26

toward the mystical and toward endless transcendental sensibility, are usually based on a
narrative of travel, of being on a path.
Music expands dance, and dance expands music: both fuse as expanding landscapes of
meaning. “Revelations,” for instance, is a depiction of the dance and movements linked to
black spiritual music and cries for freedom. Indeed, the choreography of Alvin Ailey
called “Cry” conveys in movement a sense of story, toward some form of human
liberation, a common theme. At the same time, musical expression was also connected to
themes of liberation; Marion Anderson’s “Songs of Freedom” lionized that theme in song
and expression in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after she was denied the right to
perform in the Daughters of the Revolution Hall (Arsenault 2009).
Our respect for individual expression and initiative, and for a narrative and metaphorical
expression of categories endlessly embedded in our stories, reflects an evolutionary
predilection and adaptation. These categories set the conditions for coherent action in
adapting to terrains both social and ecological. These categories are not abstract, and in
fact, they are set in everyday action.
We are not Cartesian machines, thinking in an abstract, divorced vacuum, nor are we
random inductive machines. Musical sensibility makes this very transparent. We bring
with us diverse forms of cognition that underlie what Dewey used to call “lived
experiences,” or what others have called “embodied cognition” (Gallagher 2005; Schulkin
2004; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991).
Music is often full of purpose and bound to movement, whether literal or not (Zbikowski
2012). This goes from the structured ballet of Chopin-type music, with its endless
practice and the expansion of musical movements, through Charles Ives’s “The Fourth of
July.” Music is expanded and tied to meaning, stories, and living experience, running
together in both long and short versions. Our sense of self and our sense of music are
often rooted in our life histories or our trajectory of movement through space.
Thinking, movement, and music are understood in the context of action and transacting
with others and are quite close to a pragmatist position where cognitive systems are
embedded in the organization of action (Schulkin 2009; Dewey 1896; James 1890). The
emphasis is on embodied and expanded cognitive systems (Noë, 2004; Barsalou 2003;
Wilson 2002; Clark 1997, 1999). The sensorimotor systems are themselves knotted to
cephalic machinations across all regions of the brain (Schulkin 2007; Barton 2004;
Berthoz 2002; Jeannerod 1997; Dewey 1896).
In other words, cognitive systems are not just a cortical affair, but are endemic to
cephalic function. Meyer, of course, understood this, with his kinesthetic/anticipatory
description of musical sensibility. Movement and purpose, living a life with music rich in
expectations and kinesthetic affordances, is replete with memory.
Page 15 of 26

Indeed, Johnson, a philosopher, and Larson, a musicologist, have nicely depicted the
common themes of music, movement and musical trajectories and, consistent with the
earlier works of Langer, the utter kinesthetic sensibility running through music. Music is
tied to movement and memory with vivid imagery, such as the one cited in “Over the
Rainbow,” and the expansion of our horizons by metaphors, as in George Harrison’s
“Something in the Way She Moves” (Johnson and Larson 2003). The metaphors of
movement and destination traverse the “musical landscape.” Music is a force to be
experienced.
An inherent tension in aesthetic sensibility, particularly in music, is the search for

stability and stasis (Meyer 1967). The construction of events shapes the way action is
orchestrated in music and otherwise. The shared experience with one another is a
fundamental adaptation (Tomasello and Carpenter 2007; Gallagher 2005), and the
cephalic innervations of bodily sensibility are a pervasive common element in our
evolution (Schulkin 2004; Berthoz 2002; Damasio 1994; Merleau-Ponty 1962; James
1890).
We come prepared with an evolved brain and a set of cognitive predilections that are
situated toward context, flexibility, and perceptual embodiment about objects that are
conceptually rich and vital to behavioral adaptations of action, perception, and the brain.
The emphasis is on the adaptive nature of these systems (Gigerenzer 2000) that run
through human cephalic capability, including that of two important expressions: music
and dance.
Conclusion
Aesthetic sensibilities exist amid information-processing systems in the brain that
underlie perception and are oriented toward novelty, familiarity, and syntax. The interplay
of the unfamiliar amid the familiar, variation amid repetition, is central to the formation of
our musical expectations and the pleasure we derive from surprising deviations. The
experience of music itself reflects the interaction between the performer and the one
listening (Chapin et al. 2010). Indeed, we come prepared to recognize the probabilities of
an event. Rooted in neural structures oriented toward adaptation and change, the
probabilistic and the anticipatory elicit emotional and pleasurable experiences as well as
aesthetic judgments. Musical experiences form patterns of expectations, categorical
markers (Neuhaus, Knosche, and Friederici 2006), and sentiments amplified by depth and
beauty (Rosen 2010). In sum, cognitive expectations about music are fundamental to our
experience of it.
Music, like other arts, can heighten and deepen experience. The desire to represent and
understand objects in the world is a fundamental human motivation embedded in
practice, in action, in movement or dance, and in music (Peirce 1992; Hanson 1971,
1958). We come prepared to interpret objects in our environments, and aesthetic
Page 16 of 26

judgment is part of our appraisal of ourselves and of others, of what is attractive and
what we are trying to understand. As Dewey (1934) noted, art is part of the ordinary
human experience and is part of the framework in which our worlds are understood,
adapted, and invented. Information-processing systems are continuous with bodily
representation (Langer 1957), and aesthetic judgment of movement as well as music can
therefore be understood in the context of human representation. Music and movement
are also linked through rhythmic generators and internal perceptions of time, which are
pervasive throughout nature and bodily systems. These natural phenomena underlie our
cognitive formation of expectations.
An extension of bodily representation, dance coevolved with music, reflecting human

narratives and communications of culture. Indeed, the human quest for understanding,
connection, and self-expression is highlighted in music and dance, which are expressions
of lived and shared experience, manifestations of meaning and cognitive predilections.
Cognitive anticipatory expectations stand out when one considers the close link between
music and dance. The brain is prepared to detect movement and rhythm, both familiar
and unfamiliar, with aesthetic judgment reflecting our cognitive flexibility. Music and
dance are two human activities (Huron 2001; Temperley 2001; Sloboda 1985) among
others in which expectations are cardinal features of the organization of human action
and capability.
An experimental sensibility broadens the horizon as we go from the familiar to the novel.
Our sense of continuity has its roots in problem solving and in making sense of
discrepancies. Memory and the diverse forms of cultural expressions provide a rich array
to draw on in the expansion of musical and dance expressions as we explore the
unfamiliar amid the familiar (Clarke 2005). This process began with song and was
expanded through instruments and dance. Music and movement go together in every
human society. The human condition is linked to music and dance, and the range of
human emotional expression is fundamental in this regard.
Note
This chapter was derived from a book by Jay Schulkin titled, Reflections on the Musical
Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
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Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Annual Review of Neuroscience 30: 59–88.
Jay Schulkin
American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
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Music and Movement: Expectations, Aesthetics, and Representation

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Keywords: music, movement, human, society, aesthetic, cognition, sound, expectation

Subscriber: Gothenburg University Library; date: 25 July 2018

Musical Expectations: Familiarity and Variation

Subscriber: Gothenburg University Library; date: 25 July 2018

(Huron 2006, 270)

Subscriber: Gothenburg University Library; date: 25 July 2018

Indeed, expectations are a core feature of neural organization. Repetition is essential in

Musical Expectations: Probability, Emotion,

Subscriber: Gothenburg University Library; date: 25 July 2018

Something inherent in Darwin, who did not acknowledge a separation of cognitive

Subscriber: Gothenburg University Library; date: 25 July 2018

Subscriber: Gothenburg University Library; date: 25 July 2018