Sociability, affiliation and the phatic: music as communication

Recent research indicates strongly that shared processes can underpin interaction in music and in speech. These processes seem best interpreted not as proper to speech or to music, but as characteristic of particular types of interaction: affiliative, empathic, phatic, and reciprocal, whether manifested in conversation or in music-making. The register of these types of interaction can be described as relational, being concerned with setting up and maintaining communicative fluency in interaction and with enhancing a sense of connectedness between those who are interacting. I shall describe the results of recent experiments that support this new way of understanding significant aspects of human communication, and suggest that speech and music can be fruitfully reconceptualised and investigated as overlapping subsets of a repertoire of human communicative behaviours that may be configured differently in different cultures.