Music Listening as Coping Behavior: From Reactive Response to Sense-Making

Coping is a survival mechanism of living organisms. It is not merely reactive, but also involves making sense of the environment by rendering sensory information into percepts that have meaning in the context of an organism’s cognitions. Music listening, on the other hand, is a complex task that embraces sensory, physiological, behavioral, and cognitive levels of processing. Being both a dispositional process that relies on our evolutionary toolkit for coping with the world and a more elaborated skill for sense-making, it goes beyond primitive action–reaction couplings by the introduction of higher-order intermediary variables between sensory input and effector reactions. Consideration of music-listening from the perspective of coping treats music as a sound environment and listening as a process that involves exploration of this environment as well as interactions with the sounds. Several issues are considered in this regard such as the conception of music as a possible stressor, the role of adaptive listening, the relation between coping and reward, the importance of self-regulation strategies in the selection of music, and the instrumental meaning of music in the sense that it can be used to modify the internal and external environment of the listener.