Togetherness in musical interaction

<ns3:p>This paper presents a model of musical togetherness (MT), defined as the sense of musical connection that arises during real-time interaction and results in feelings of social connection, pleasure, and trust. The model comprises three layers. The first layer, which provides a backdrop for subsequent layers, comprises players’ knowledge and expectations about what will unfold during an interaction. The second layer comprises five processes that build upon one another: Belief in intentional partners in a shared musical environment, perceived liveness, and perceived responsivity mainly strengthen the social dimension of MT, while perceived embodied alignment and joint agency mainly strengthen the positive valence dimension. The third layer comprises rewarding feelings of social connection, pleasure and trust. These feelings feed back to affect the second layer processes, effectively guiding players’ musical decision-making and behaviour. They also feed back to affect the first layer, creating lasting effects on the way players approach musical interactions and relate to their interaction partners. MT should be seen as a fluid aspect of interaction that fluctuates alongside the aesthetic quality of the music. Players will sometimes sacrifice MT in the short term in order to improve the quality of their playing and strengthen their sense of MT in the long term. The MT model provides structure for a construct that has been used casually in the music psychology literature and has implications for how the performance behaviour of ensemble musicians is understood.</ns3:p>