Regulating Attention and Emotion in Music Practice and performance

Abstract

The current literature survey was conducted starting with important concepts related to music performance, musicians’ attention regulation and wellbeing as mentioned in books such as Bruser (1997), Green and Gallwey (2015), and McLachlan (2017). The survey was carried out to investigate current interdisciplinary research and academic explorations on music practice and performance, meditation, emotion-regulation and self-regulation. It is shown conclusively that attention to sound, internal singing, and imagery are the anchors of attention in music-making. They are similar to concentration tools such as breathing, mantra, and visualization in focused attention (FA) meditation. In a broad sense, the principles of open monitoring (OM) meditation and FA meditation could be seen as the strategic approaches to regulate attention and emotion, and promote self-regulation among musicians.