Music occupies a remarkably wide conceptual territory in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmological principle, psychic quality, neurophysiological regulator, and vehicle of transcendence. At one pole stands the Ficinian-Neoplatonic tradition, recovered chiefly by Thomas Moore, which distinguishes three orders: musica instrumentalis (audible sound), musica humana (the rhythmic patterning of soul), and musica mundana (the harmonic structure of the cosmos itself). In this framework, audible music ranks lowest; the higher music is ontological, an elemental quality of psyche parallel to air in nature. Iain McGilchrist situates music squarely within right-hemisphere epistemology: music is constituted entirely by relational 'betweenness,' and its migration toward explicit, language-like structures in modernity signals a dangerous hemispheric imbalance. James Hillman recovers music's Saturnine-melancholic register, linking it to the hidden interior earth and to the nostalgia of spirit for an invisible domain. At the neurophysiological pole, Porges and Dana demonstrate that music operates directly on autonomic state through neuroception, sending signals of safety or danger. Keltner and Harrison document music as a primary elicitor of awe and frisson — transcendent psychophysiological experiences with cross-cultural validity. The tension between music as cosmic-psychic structure and music as autonomic-neurological event runs through the entire corpus, making this term a pivotal site for the dialogue between depth psychology and embodied science.
In the library
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musica instrumentalis, or music in sound as we know it today, was rated lowest in the hierarchy. More important manifestations of music were musica mundana, the music of the cosmos played in the seasons of the year and in the rhythms of the planets; and musica humana, human music or the music of the soul
Moore reconstructs the Boethian-Ficinian threefold hierarchy of music, arguing that modernity has reduced music to its lowest form and lost the cosmic and psychic registers that constituted its deeper significance.
Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982thesis
musica instrumentalis, or music in sound as we know it today, was rated lowest in the hierarchy. More important manifestations of music were musica mundana, the music of the cosmos played in the seasons of the year and in the rhythms of the planets; and musica humana, human music or the music of the soul
The revised edition repeats Moore's central argument that the Renaissance cosmological hierarchy of music — instrumentalis, humana, mundana — was displaced by modernity, impoverishing both psychology and art.
Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990thesis
music was, for Ficino, a quality of the soul itself, an elemental factor in its constitution, parallel to the air element in nature... one of the most striking powers of music is its capacity to produce a multidimensional image
Moore presents Ficino's dual conception of music: as an operative art working on soul through sound, and as an ontological quality of soul itself, constituted by multidimensional, synaesthetic imagery.
Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982thesis
music was, for Ficino, a quality of the soul itself, an elemental factor in its constitution, parallel to the air element in nature... one of the most striking powers of music is its capacity to produce a multidimensional image
Repeating the core Ficinian thesis, Moore asserts that music is not merely an external art but an intrinsic structural property of the psyche, producing non-visual, multidimensional images.
Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990thesis
Music consists entirely of relations, 'betweenness'. The notes mean nothing in themselves: the tensions between the notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness, are everything.
McGilchrist argues that music is the paradigmatic right-hemisphere phenomenon because it is constituted wholly by relational 'betweenness' rather than by discrete entities — making it the exemplar of holistic, contextual knowing.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
Music occurs frequently in connection with Saturn, especially in the Renaissance and humanist accounts... This music belongs to the interior earth, a 'music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all'
Hillman recovers the Saturnine-melancholic dimension of music, linking it to the hidden interior earth, the nostalgia of spirit, and to states of sadness and death that open access to invisible, chthonic depths.
Music can send sounds of safety or signal a call to survival. Muscles of the Social Engagement System (face, head, middle ear) are active in both listening to and producing music... Music moves us, not only putting bodies in motion but also stirring autonomic state shifts.
Porges grounds music's emotional power in polyvagal neuroscience, demonstrating that musical frequencies operate directly on neuroception and autonomic state, bypassing conscious cognition to signal safety or threat.
Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011thesis
Music can send sounds of safety or signal a call to survival... Through our neuroception we take in the music and an autonomic state is activated. In the expressive plane, we hear the mood of the music, and neuroception moves into perception, as we connect our own meaning to a song.
Dana applies Porges's polyvagal framework to clinical practice, describing how music activates autonomic states through neuroception before ascending to conscious emotional meaning-making.
Dana, Deb, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018supporting
Walter Pater's aphorism that all art aspired to the condition of music alluded to the fact that music is the least explicit of all the arts (and the one most directly attuned to our embodied nature). In the twentieth century, by contrast, art has aspired to the condition of language
McGilchrist uses Pater's aphorism as a diagnostic for cultural pathology: the modernist reversal from aspiring toward music's implicitness to aspiring toward language's explicitness signals a destructive shift toward left-hemisphere dominance.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
In being moved by our culture's music, we are moved to its ways of perceiving, of feeling, of being, which can strike us with the awe of epiphany — of recognizing who we are.
Keltner argues that music functions as a cultural archive of identity, inducing awe precisely because it positions individuals within collective patterns of perception and being that exceed private selfhood.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
many cultures conceive of music as an integrative, full-body phenomenon... many regional West African languages do not have a word for music as a solely auditory phenomenon. Rather, any proper translation of 'music' necessarily includes a strong choreographic element and active communal participation
Harrison draws on ethnomusicology to demonstrate that the Western reduction of music to an auditory event is culturally parochial; cross-culturally, music is an embodied, communal, and kinetic phenomenon.
Harrison, Luke, Thrills, chills, frissons, and skin orgasms: toward an integrative model of transcendent psychophysiological experiences in music, 2014supporting
human-made sounds that originated as an affective communication system may have gradually honed the human mind into an entity that treats music as an esthetic experience, including peak experiences. This ability confers a common intuitive grasp of the sublime
Harrison situates musical frisson within evolutionary theory, proposing that music as an affective communication system shaped the mind's capacity for peak experience and intuitive grasp of the sublime.
Harrison, Luke, Thrills, chills, frissons, and skin orgasms: toward an integrative model of transcendent psychophysiological experiences in music, 2014supporting
Musical expectancy develops and grows in response to the extent to which your brain is exposed to music... Music appreciation, and your emotional reactions to it, can end up in something of a positive feedback loop
Burnett explains that emotional response to music is partly a learned, self-amplifying capacity — musical expectancy deepens through exposure, binding memory, cognition, and emotion in a reinforcing loop.
Burnett, Dean, The emotional brain lost and found in the science of, 2023supporting
people mostly prefer the music they were exposed to in their youth, especially their teens. This is the phenomenon of the 'reminiscence bump', where no matter how old you get, the memories from your adolescence and early twenties tend to remain clearer than others.
Burnett documents the neurological basis of the reminiscence bump, showing how music's emotional intensity during adolescence — when higher regulatory regions are still maturing — permanently shapes musical preference and memory.
Burnett, Dean, The emotional brain lost and found in the science of, 2023supporting
the acceptability and emotional meaning of music is not purely culture-bound. In fact it is almost universal... Norwegians acculturated to a Western musical tradition make precisely the same associations between particular emotions and particular musical intervals as are made in Ancient Indian music
McGilchrist marshals cross-cultural evidence that musical emotional meaning transcends particular traditions, pointing toward a universal psychobiological substrate for music's affective power.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
the music of speech. In response to this, mothers expand the pitch excursions, broaden the repertoire and raise the overall pitch of their speech, as soon as their child is born... These processes, then, in newborns have more to do with the activation of areas of the brain which subserve the non-verbal, the musical, aspects of speech.
McGilchrist traces the primacy of the musical dimension of speech in early development, arguing that prosody — not language — constitutes the original right-hemisphere medium of human communication.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
Average measurements of HR (beats/m), EMG, and RESP for subject-selected (Chills) and control (Ctrl) music conditions
Blood's neuroimaging study provides empirical evidence that intensely pleasurable responses to music produce measurable physiological changes correlated with activity in reward and emotion circuits of the brain.
Blood, Anne J., Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music Correlate with Activity in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion, 2001supporting
Music is all around you, affecting your physiology and your feelings. Along with activating a ventral vagal response, music has a paradoxical effe
Dana positions music as a pervasive environmental regulator of autonomic state, applicable clinically to activate ventral vagal safety responses in therapeutic contexts.
Deb A Dana, Deb Dana, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection A Guide for, 2018supporting
the more rapid the music, the more arousing we humans tend to find it... dissonant sounds lack harmony; when heard together, they 'clash', rather
Burnett outlines the psychoacoustic parameters — tempo, volume, dissonance — through which music triggers arousal and emotional response at the level of basic neural architecture.
Burnett, Dean, The emotional brain lost and found in the science of, 2023supporting
I read and write, eat and even sleep with music in my ears. I cannot walk the dog without a sonata, a symphony, an aria sounding on the earphones.
Maté offers a phenomenological self-portrait of compulsive musical consumption, implicitly framing the relentless need for music as an addictive coping mechanism with psychological significance.
Maté, Gabor, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008aside
appreciating music and dance, can all induce awe... through awe, collective movement — in ceremony and ritual, in dance, and in shared music — can benefit health and well-being.
Keltner identifies shared music as a reliable inducer of awe within collective ritual contexts, linking it to measurable health benefits through the diminishment of self and heightened sense of communal belonging.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe: A Pathway to Health, 2023aside