Music Listening Is an Action Verb: Phoronomy, Sound Tracking and Morphodynamic Transformation

This article is a follow-up of a previous article where music was defined as matter or substance that flows. It argued for a rheological approach to music listening, conceiving of music as a virtual, motional object that evolves over time. The current article proceeds on similar lines by introducing the concept of phoronomy as the kinematic study of motion. It revolves about the way listeners can perceptually track sound by relying on motor imagery and ideomotor simulation, thus describing listening as an action verb by entailing active engagement with the sonic world. Listening, in that view, is a real-time phenomenon that keeps pace with the unfolding of the music, involving a kind of sound tracking that is characterized by sensory immediacy and perceptual bonding. By elaborating on the root metaphor of drawing an imaginary curve, it explores how listeners can stay as closely to the music as possible through a gestural approach that describes the listening experience as a virtual trajectory through virtual space. An attempt is made to provide both foundational grounding from broader theoretical frameworks and recent empirical findings.