The preceding analyses of four musical works, though not sufficient to offer a complete picture, nonetheless revealed some nuances in the co-articulative relationship between music and its audience. These nuances were observed through the lens of circumscribed affordances and redistribution of what can be sensed by whom.

The circumscription of affordance by music creators takes place along a graded spectrum. Within a work’s situated cultural contexts, some circumscribed affordances are broadly available to many listeners, while others remain accessible only to a select few. One factor differentiating the two is the degree of listeners’ familiarity with the elements involved in the affordances. Due to widespread familiarity, formal operations on melodies, the tonal system, and analytical listening were rendered effective for Beethoven, and those on the concert conventions gained impact for Cage. In contrast, recognising the GDR anthem and detecting idiosyncrasies in the symphonic form were affordances confined to a narrower group of listeners.

Another closely related factor is the universality of the requisite abilities.²¹ The spatial localisation of sound exploited in und als wir is an innate ability for most, and musical recognition and association in QUADRATUREN V may even occur subconsciously for some. By contrast, tracing motivic developments in Symphony No. 9 is a cultivated skill dependent on short-term memory and continuous exposure.

That said, familiarities and abilities alone may not suffice. To appreciate the sonic diversity experienced among fellow listeners in und als wir, for example, one must possess not only the capacity for perspective-taking but also a predisposition to shift attention from the stage to those around them. Additional factors such as current mood, neighbours’ reactions, and incidental events may further influence such propensity.

As evident above, some preferred affordances categorically divide listeners, as exemplified by the requirement of prior familiarity for recognising the GDR anthem in QUADRATUREN V.²² Others, conversely, produce relatively indistinct and gradational splits, as in following motivic transformations in Beethoven’s Ninth, appreciating environmental sounds in 4’33”, or experiencing heightened intersubjective awareness in und als wir. This variance largely arises from the determinability of the respective preconditions demanded of the listeners—for example, while favourable contingencies during performance may draw a listener towards the preferred group in the latter cases, the same cannot be said for the former.

For the temporal transformation of circumscribed affordances, we have identified an instance at the level of perceived ontology: with no awareness of its conceptual idea, QUADRATUREN V initially presents itself as abstract orchestral sound, which only later reveals itself as a deformation of the GDR anthem. As one would expect, temporal transformation also operates at finer time scales and across other levels. Each movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, exemplarily, affords a generally distinct mode of engagement: the Scherzo emphasises swift attentional reorientation to imitative entries and the entrainment to rhythmic pulses, whereas the lyrical third movement prioritises sustained attention to the long-breathed melodic motions and the perception of timbral warmth. Even within the first movement’s continuous strand of thematic development, circumscribed affordances also evolve—from the cognitive tasks of recognising and encoding the theme to memory-based recall and cross-instance comparisons—as the surface-level elements remain qualitatively similar.

On this point, one should also not overlook that audience’s familiarity, abilities, and other conditions may also transform over the course of a performance. With the performance being the main focus, repeated exposure to its recurring materials and syntaxes may intensify the affordance convergence or divergence across the audience, depending on the specific configuration of relations between the materials and the listeners. This often, but not always, shifts its preferred affordances closer to circumscribed affordances. In 4’33”, for example, accidental sounds typically increase as time passes, heightening the likelihood that random and spontaneous sounds are detected and perceived as shared affordances even by those initially not so inclined. Additionally, or contrarily, if tension discernibly develops among part of the audience, convergence may form around the perception of the hall’s social dynamics.

Finally, these different listeners’ preconditions—whether familiarity, abilities, or dispositions—on which the redistribution of what can be sensed by whom is based, do not arise in a vacuum. They are shaped not only by natural orders such as biophysical constraints but also by socio-cultural orders such as norms and power relations specific to each context. Re­dis­trib­utions, being a form of dissensus, directly intervene in those orders. In Beethoven’s Ninth, the memorable “Ode to Joy” tune lowers the threshold of comprehension for lay listeners, whereby softening the class-coded boundaries that partially contribute to the divide. Und als wir likewise democratises hearing within the concert audience, a move that also poses a challenge to the established concert practice shaped by the auditory privilege surrounding the idealised “sweet spot".²³

4.1. Strategies for redistributing what can be sensed by whom

Understanding the gradational property of circumscribed affordances, the varying patterns of redistribution, and the listeners’ preconditions underpinning them provides the basis for developing deliberate redistributive strategies. Among the immense possibilities, one promising strategy involves explicitly formulating more than one collection of circumscribed affordances, each tailored to a distinct set of listeners’ preconditions in their respective cultural contexts. At a second-order level, the relations between the different collections of circumscribed affordances may also undergo abrupt or gradual transformations over time, such that initially distinct sets progressively incorporate shared components, resulting in convergence or concentration, or conversely, divergence or dilution.²⁴

The nuances identified in the preceding section are likewise mobilised here. For example, listeners’ highly determinate preconditions are used to delineate distinct sets of circumscribed affordances, and those exhibiting gradational qualities are leveraged in facilitating gradual convergence between sets. An approximate instance illustrating the latter is the increasing resolution of the anthem in QUADRATUREN V, which shows the principle by which gradual convergence between sets of circumscribed affordances—tailored for listeners with varying anthem-recognising abilities in this case—may occur.

These strategies are employed to reconfigure what can be sensed and experienced by whom among the audience. The redistributive outcome may constitute an intervention—in the form of an enquiry, dialogue or critique—into existing distributions shaped by intersecting established orders. This approach consciously considers how prevailing socio-cultural orders influence particular listeners’ preconditions. Al­ter­na­tively, a different approach may depart from an inquiry into the redistributive potentials of the musical materials and their interplay with possible circumscribed affordances, thereby allowing unforeseen relations to emerge. This latter approach results in an open-ended, novel distribution without predetermined ties to established orders. Both approaches may also be applied to different aspects of a single work. In either case, the redistributions serve to articulate previously unexposed relations among individual listeners.

4.2. Strategies for motivating intersubjective awareness

A crucial dimension in catalysing new redistributions within the audience is the elevation and foregrounding of these intersubjective differences as integral to the aesthetic experience. Strategies that pursue this aim capitalise on and build upon the idiosyncratic social dynamics inherent within the frame of concert performance. Central to these strategies is a deliberate partial reallocation of the audience’s mental resources, steering attention away from the primary objective of attentive listening towards a conscious or subconscious awareness of intersubjective variations. While the redistributive strategies outlined in the previous section may, by deviating from conventional distributive norms, sufficiently highlight these emergent relations, their efficacy can often be enhanced by supplementary strategies that further guide attention.

External sensory cues may heighten the sensory salience of certain audience members for others. In the case of und als wir, the intervention is on the audience’s seating arrangement encircling the cross-shaped stage formation. As the listener tracks the changes in the visual location of the sound source on stage, the presence of other audience members and any of their reactions within the same visual field amplifies their visual salience. With fellow audience members coming into focus, the threshold for recognising differences among listeners is lowered.

The steering of attention towards the intersubjective realm may also be facilitated by the presence of mental cues, including via conceptual priming (e.g. Pecher, Zeelenberg & Barsalou 2003). This is also manifested in und als wir, though it occurs intrinsically rather than as an added procedure. On one hand, the unique cruciform stage layout and the acoustic anomalies make spatial relations salient; on the other, the intersubjective differences in this work are tied to listeners’ seating positions. The spatial reasoning recruited to make sense of the former peculiarities also serves to prime other spatial relations in the scene. Consequently, the likelihood that listeners direct attention to intersubjective differences is enhanced by their readiness for spatial reasoning. In this way, the priming of spatial relations can be considered a mental cue that foregrounds intersubjective variations.²⁵