Music, Sound and Wellbeing Course Resources

Definitions

Wellbeing

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

CDC

Happiness and Eudaimonia

Wellness

National Wellness

Global Wellness Institute

Key concepts for this class

• "Culture" as an uncountable noun (but treated, for convenience, as if countable, like languages (sort of) are.
• phonemic and phonetic distinction from linguistics, e.g.:
  • t and ṭ are equivalent ("2 allophones") in English, but differentiate (2 phonemes) mutrib (dusty) and muṭrib (singer) in Arabic;
  • p and b are equivalent ("2 allophones") in Arabic, but differentiate (2 phonemes) park and bark in English
• the idea of local cultural/subjective perspective or standpoint: "local knowledge" (Geertz), cosmology, ethos/eidos (Bateson) (the way "a culture" views the world, following the traditional anthropological notion of culture as a countable noun, which was admittedly truer in the past than in the globalized present), "idioknowledge", personal experience: the "emic" perspective of a particular culture bearer - local/individual distinctions and meanings). Ethno as a prefix indicating a local knowledge system (e.g. "ethnobotany"). Usually the "emic" is inferred from language and the way it divides reality in a conceptual ontology. Example: the color spectrum is physically continuous, but each language divides it into named colors.
• the idea of a global/bird's eye/neutral/objective perspective: "scientific knowledge", the "etic" perspective [but: does such a perspective really exist?]
• if there is no objective reality, what is our shared reality? Perhaps: an "intersubjective" space.
• the difference between the emic/etic distinction and the insider/outsider distinction (the outsider does not necessarily bring an "etic" perspective at all!)
• emic and etic applied to music: we may contrast the word "music" used emically (where it may vary in meaning depending on context: in the university, vs in the street) and etically. E.g. "music" as etic vs emic or outsider vs insider. For example: how would you classify this? For a Muslim: it's qira'a or tilawa, and definitely not music or singing (or that word's cognates in local languages), but for an Egyptian Muslim it might sound strangely foreign due to the unusual tonality (it's from Niger). For a non-Muslim it might sound like music or singing. With a suitable etic definition of "music" perhaps it is music, but one has to be careful here, lest the "etic" definition be confused with an "emic" one.
• discourses: emergent structures of communication, operating within the lifeworld.
• source (any object) vs reference (a set of objectively true statements). Nothing is a pure reference, though many claim to be. Critique defined as adding a layer of commentary to a source in order to move it towards reference. (Metaphorically and practically: critique as marginal notes as in this Arabic manuscript.
• Phenomenology: a philosophical position within the "Continental" [European] tradition, starting from observation of and reflection upon the structures of experience, meaning and consciousness (through introspection or -- in the social sciences -- interview), as the basis for metaphysics, leading to concepts such as intersubjectivity and the notion of the lifeworld
• A priori (logical) vs a posteriori (empirical) reason; the former subdivided into analytic (tautological) vs synthetic (non-tautological) (from Kant)
• Analytic philosophy: a philosophical position based on a rigorous analysis of language, combined with mathematics, logic, and logical positivism; tends towards the ahistoric search for objective truth, and associated with British and American philosophy
• Empiricism, logical positivism: deriving fact from experimentation with observables, combined with statistical inferences; inductive scientific method
• lifeworld (locus of human meaning) vs system (emergent structures of control, beyond anyone's knowledge or capacity, operating according steering media of power/wealth capital, including economic, political, and legal systems), tending to maximize short-term gains. The system emerges out of the lifeworld, on which it depends, in a potentially mutualistic or (in recent history) parasitic relationship; in the latter case the system may (ironically) destroy the lifeworld, and hence itself (e.g. environmental destruction). Habermas (critical theorist and foremost exponent of this oppositional pair, lifeworld/system) developed the powerful metaphor: the system's "colonization of the lifeworld" (consider: advertising imagery)
• critical theory: a form of critique, in which an object (phenomenon, person, trend, etc.) is situated within the system/life world frame, showing how all knowledge, theory, and practice respond to individual and collective interests, situated, constrained, and shaped within a broader system evolving over time; perhaps the model is Marxism, but post-Marxists (including the Frankfurt School of critical theory) developed this notion in new directions, for instance showing how culture could play an active role in suppressing class consciousness.
• disciplinary directions (and rough alignments, but note that the alignment is only approximate - more an aide-mémoire than a fact!) - all of which may be interpreted as continua/axes rather than clear cut distinctions (and there are many exceptions to the implied associations)
  • humanistic vs. scientific [vs critical vs action]; humanities vs sciences
  • pure research vs applied (action) research
  • emic vs etic
  • meaning/value vs fact
  • understanding/communication vs. explanation/prediction
  • qualitative (no variables) vs quantitative (discrete variable based...not necessarily numeric)
  • lifeworld focus vs system focus in social explanation/understanding
  • hermeneutic vs empirical (inductive)
  • phenomenological/(inter)subjectivity vs. logical positivism/empiricism/objectivity
  • idiographic (depth - case) vs nomothetic (breadth - law) (Kant -> Wilhelm Windelband; the latter formulated the terms holding that they are 2 integrating points of view, the former more typical of humanities; the latter of sciences). Nomothetic stems from our tendency to generalize towards law, i.e. in the natural sciences. Idiographic stems from our tendency to specify, and is typical for the humanities, in search of meaning.

Research methods

Sage research methods

See especially the Sage methods map, and the following subcategories:

• Research design
• Data collection
  • Qualitative data collection
    • Ethnography
    • Observational research
  • Quantitative data collection
    • Survey research
• Clinical research
• Applied research
  • Action research