Abstract

There is considerable empirical evidence that musical experience seems to alleviate the felt severity of painful episodes. On its face, this influence is philosophically puzzling. Why should hearing notes from a piano make the burn on my hand any less painful? The influence of music on pain does not seem easily explained using the frameworks developed for paradigm multisensory influences. In this paper, I critically survey and endorse the evidence that musical experience influences felt pain severity, a form of influence I call a “multi-affective interaction.” I argue that such interactions cannot be easily accommodated by extant accounts of traditional multisensory interactions. The difficulty arises in part from the complexity and multifaceted nature of both musical experience and the aversive qualities associated with pain. Despite this complexity, there remains a coherent structure and organization to the way in which these elements interact. I end the paper by exploring one such form of interaction, a limited resource model whereby affective-motivational states interact because they share—and therefore must compete over—a limited set of motivational tools.