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‘Feeling’ and ‘sensing’ in practice research can refer to a wide range of experiences, from the sensory and somatic through to the affective, apparently intuitive and instinctual feelings that guide the development of practice. While music psychology and the cognitive sciences offer approaches to studying these phenomena, their methods and the kinds of data generated do not always help us to better understand and account for the significance of felt experience in the complexities of musical performance and reception. On the other hand, researchers citing sensed and felt experience as part of their research narrative may fear criticism of being overly subjective or lacking rigour.

The aim of this day is to explore how practice researchers in music can account for the role of sensing and feeling in their embodied practice. What are the challenges of incorporating, interrogating or accounting for feeling and sensing into embodied research? What role can sensory engagement with instruments, objects and practices play in the research process? When is ‘intuition’ a form of embodied knowledge, and when does ‘just a feeling’ signal expert insight? How can we discuss and document these crucial aspects of practice research in a way that is academically meaningful, and yet acknowledges their essentially subjective and non-linguistic nature?

Embodied practice and embodied research have become thematic hotspots in recent musical discourse, affording researchers the means to recognise and articulate technical, sensory, affective, perceptual and tacit knowledge forms as investigative territories. We recognise embodied research as a relatively new methodology within the academic discipline of music, and note that musicians still often articulate their insights by drawing substantially on conceptual frameworks external to music—e.g. from theatre, dance and physical performance, social epistemology, and philosophy of science. We hope this event will clarify and highlight some of the novel embodied methods at work in musical practices, and begin to establish the keystones that are distinct to embodied research in music.