Peter Atkins

Username: Peter Atkins

Participant details

	Network Member	Peter Atkins
	Organisation/Institution	University of New South Wales
	Department/Centre	English, Media and the Performing Arts
	Lab	School of Music
	Website	experiencingmusic.googlepages.com
	Research area	Music Perception and Production Music Perception
	Research keywords	spirituality, transcendence, emotion, meaning, experience

Research Interests

To have a powerful experience of music is not unusual. To refer to it as ‘spiritual’ is no longer so unusual. But what is meant by that designation? Music can subscribe to a range of meanings, from structural syntax to ethereal encounters. It wants to communicate and yet it is profoundly ineffable. My research investigates significant experiences of music, and the relationship between the type of meaning involved and the desire to consider those experiences as spiritual. Spirituality can be described as an experiential phenomenon comprising three basic elements; transcendence, connection and meaning. As this phenomenon relates to music, I seek to determine whether it is a product of the associations music is so capable of collecting, or a feature of the musical forms? If the latter, what relationship does it tolerate with emotion? I propose that the dominance of emotion as the primary phenomenon of musical experience over the last several decades is over stated, and that spirituality is, while related to emotion, a more fundamental element in the human-music nexus.

Member for: 3 years 10 months 1 weeks 5 days