Plenisentient Musicking

In this article, I propose the concept of plenisentience as a way to rethink our understanding of how musicking affects its participants. I pursue a dialogic approach that sets a historical exploration of early modern Christian European experiences of music-making alongside an inquiry into present-day scientific approaches to music perception and the human sensorium. These early modern experiences were often deeply embodied, exuberantly multi-sensory and easily overflowed the ear-to-brain pathway posited in our current standard account of (musical) listening. In challenging the dualistic Cartesian anthropology of later Western modernity, these historical accounts align strikingly with recent research into multi-sensory integration, non-cochlear hearing and enactive cognition. I propose that the conjunctions and discrepancies between these two paradigms invite us to develop a radically revised humanistic-scientific vision of how human body-minds make sense of music and the world at large.