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religious music, where context and a strong disposition to react in specific ways are important aspects to master if one wants to display appropriate behaviour in the musical context.
When talking about appropriate behaviour, I mean the cultural or contextual consensus regarding which behavioural patterns are appropriate to display when perceiving music in the context it belongs. If you listen to, or sing, Western funeral music at home, you are welcome to sing and dance at the same time, but, when participating in a funeral ritual in modern western societies, you must follow the slow rhythm and sombre mood of the ritual, and that is often dictated by the music.
Habitus can be described as an embodied pattern of action and reaction in which we are not fully conscious of why we do what we do; not totally determined, but having a tendency to behave in a certain way. “The stance of the listener is not a given, not natural, but necessarily influenced by place, time, the shared context of culture, and the intricate and irreproducible details of one‟s personal biography” (Becker 71). This notion reaches back to the reciprocal process of structural coupling as a process which entrails the co-ontogeny of all its members within a society, making each culture (slightly) different with regard to reaction and interpretation of perceptions. A clear example is provided by Claude Levi-Strauss: “In Australia, the Warramunga prescribe noise before death and silence afterwards; in South America, a Bororo rite concerning the ancestors requires silence first, then noise” (Levi-Strauss: 334). It is also noteworthy that in some traditional cultures, a distinction between music and dance is not made: for example, the Igbo (African) term „nkwa‟ denotes „singing, playing instruments, and dancing‟, and there is, apparently, no concept in that culture of „music‟ being solely based on sound (Panksepp: 141).
As we have seen, musical entrainment implies a profound association between different people at a physiological level and a shared tendency to behave in the same way at a biological level. The implications of this view for studies of socialization and identification are obvious. This brings into focus the process of enculturation and what this means in terms of perceptual understanding with regards to music. “Someone‟s ability to respond appropriately to a given musical stimulus