To orient my inquiry, this research adopts a pragmatic approach in understanding the listening process, arguing that meaning-/sense-making is co-specified by the musical performance and the listener (e.g. Reybrouck 2017). Since music, unlike discursive languages, is largely underdetermined—lacking fixed and stable meanings—both the musical performance and the listener contribute substantially to what can be experienced and interpreted.² Hence, music creators (e.g. composers, performers, organisers and curators) may be understood as performing the work of shaping affordances, such as by narrowing or broadening the ranges of possible engagements. An analogy may be drawn with a conference presentation: the sudden raising of an index finger by the presenter drastically reduces the statistical randomness of what is attended to, even if not by everyone. Audience members, drawing on their own pre-existing frameworks, are then left to complete their individual processes of sense-making.³

It is crucial to recognise further the second order of this co-specification. Music creators’ affordance shaping, especially in composed works, is often predicated on some form of advance anticipation of listeners’ sense-making and the situating socio-cultural contexts. The scope and nature of this anticipation vary across creators—ranging from conscious compositional strategies to implicit cultural conventions, habitual practices, or outright disregard—yet it invariably relies on or presupposes some of those preconditions. Hence, far from being an innocent co-specifier, which still contributes to co-specification, music creators—whether consciously or tacitly—circumscribe, successfully or not, certain engagements from listeners, just as a raised index finger in a given context signals the reorienting of attention under a widely shared cultural code.⁴

This creative agency of music creators in shaping what is afforded within a performance, together with audience’s expectations of it, forms an indispensable part of the established cultural code of the performance event. This makes it possible, in the performance-listener co-specification of musical sense-making, to differentiate between affordances that are possible but fall outside circumscription, and those that are circumscribed through the creators’ interventions as mediated by cultural codes. I call the latter “circumscribed affordances”: they are not reducible to creators’ intentions but emerge from the negotiation of these explicit or implied intentions with the material and formal properties of the work, under the shared cultural code of a performance event as well as the broader cultural contexts—including listeners’ preconditions—in which it takes place.⁵

This notion can be illustrated with another analogy: a carpenter may create a prototypical chair. If someone steps on it, uses it as a weapon, or burns it as fuel, these actions, while fully possible, fall outside the chair’s circumscribed affordance, since they disregard the unique material and structural properties of the object in relation to human beings and transgress the culturally recognised intended uses of this man-made product. However, those who do sit on the chair can use it in various ways—sitting for different durations, crossing their legs or not—without leaving the circumscribed bounds.

The point of this notion is not to draw a strict binary between what falls inside or outside the circumscribed affordances of a work. Rather, it is to highlight that affordances exist on a spectrum, with fuzzy boundaries often contested even within a shared cultural framework. Because of this, it can also be productive in certain situations to introduce a further distinction between those affordances that are more strictly circumscribed and those that are merely preferred: a chair designed for reading or watching television in a living room may not be fully circumscribed, or at least not preferred, for use at a dining table due to its height, colour or design.⁶

Recall also that creators’ anticipation presupposes listeners’ preconditions, which are constitutive of the cultural contexts within which circumscribed affordances take shape. It therefore follows that the scope and status of a work’s circumscribed affordances vary with the listener group being addressed: they are not uniform across audiences but relational to their preconditions. A child’s stool circumscribed for children’s use may not afford the same possibilities for adults, whose larger size and weight impose different demands on the object.

The gradational nature of affordances, determined and contested through a work’s properties and its cultural contexts, forms the basis of my redistribution of what can be sensed by whom among the audience. Through this framework, heterogeneous constellations of circumscribed and preferred affordances can be articulated within a musical work in relation to the varied preconditions of its listeners.

Before outlining my own redistributive and foregrounding strategies in composition, I will examine how affordances are shaped in existing musical works and consider the extent to which they facilitate the redistribution of what can be sensed by whom. Attending to the particularities of these co-articulations will not only help illuminate the concepts of circumscribed and preferred affordances but also help clarify the grounds on which new compositional strategies can be developed.