This response to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's paper questions whether the (explanatory) movement between culture, nature, biology and music is as seamless as his argument suggests.

This paper presents a view of musical listening as an active, dynamic and interactive process. After briefly considering the historical valorization of listening as critical act within Western musical culture, the paper describes the cognitive processes of schematization that are involved in musical listening. The central role of active engagement with the auditory environment in eliciting emotional responses to music is then sketched out, and the scope and limits of the attentional and motoric processes involved in processes of entrainment – focal in the experience of musical time – are outlined. Neuroscientific evidence that suggests that music is best conceived in terms of a perception–action cycle is reviewed, and the paper concludes by proposing that music is best conceptualized – from a biological perspective – as a communicative medium that is optimal for the management of situations of social uncertainty.

This paper outlines an approach to listening drawn from the anthropology and sociology of music, arguing that there is a pressing need for comparative empirical studies of listening. I suggest that the terms of the discussion should shift from listening to the broader category of musical experience, in this way allowing questions of the encultured, affective, corporeal and located nature of musical experience to arise in a stronger way than hitherto. I propose a focus on the relations between musical object and listening subject, where this entails analysis of the social and historical conditions that bear on listening, and of the changing types of subjectivity brought to music. The point is that neither these conditions, nor the forms of music's mediation, nor the relations between musical object and subject can be fully known in advance. I sketch three perspectives from anthropology and sociology that indicate the kinds of insight offered by empirical research which takes listening-as-musical-experience, and the situated, relational analysis of musical subjects and objects, as its focus.

This paper aims to demonstrate that listening is not only a highly complex sensory-perceptive phenomenon, but also an activity that invites considerations of its moral, political and religious dimensions. Drawing from the perspective of an early monastic tradition that understood theology as a sounding practice rather than a primarily cognitive one, the author draws attention to the fact that the biblical tradition itself prioritized hearing over seeing in its portrayal of the human being as ‘all ear’ when communicating with and responding to a God that addresses her from the first. Analyses of Martin Luther's account of the new creation in Christ as one that will be awakened to hearing afresh, thus becoming attentive to the ‘address of creation through creation’, and of his theology of the psalter, in which the reformer presents an excitingly different hermeneutics of scriptural interpretation based on the sensory perception of hearing/chanting the text, prepare for concluding remarks on the inevitably communicative and quasi-sacramental character of listening.

This response aims to widen the implications suggested by Bernd Wannenwetsch by exploring how music may promote a listening that breaks out of a monad-like subject.

Contributions to the discussions following the papers presented at the Royal Musical Association conference ‘Listening: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ held at King's College, Cambridge, on 24–25 November 2006 were particularly animated. This paper attempts to capture in outline the main exchanges of the question-and-answer sessions, while at the same time doing justice to the broad interdisciplinary spirit that characterized the event.