3. Social Aesthetics and shared sensibility from singing together.

Singing together is like joining a whirlwind of the emotions that we bring and transform into one single emotion. Hearing your own voice and the other's, connecting with your own pulse and with the other's. A sense of belonging and community. Singing together is singing with one voice. I feel like my soul unites with the others and we are simply one. (Vivi, 34, CJordão) When the song enters me, it is cleansing, soft, the vibration of my body becomes harmonious, light, smooth. Singing together brings unity, common goals. Singing together adjusts loneliness. I love to hear my voice. (Isadora, 55, LAMCI)

I behave as part of the group and follow the flow of events, attentive to my role of conductor/leader. My senses are awakened and I feel the heat of excitement in my body. A feeling of joy overcomes me when we form a circle and sing and dance together. I find a smile on my face and I remember myself as a child at play; I hear the voices coalesce, fill the space around me and vibrate on my skin like my own voice. I feel close to everyone in the circle and I see in their eyes what I see in myself (...)

In the experiences recorded in the logbooks of the participants, among whom I include myself, singing together emerges as a place of encounters and perception of the other, as well as a sense of belonging to a community, embodied in listening to one's own voice while listening to the voice of the other, perceiving oneself as an active voice as part of the group's singing, opening up to what is different, new friendships, sharing feelings and memories, in the repertoire of personally significant songs provided by the participants, in the perception that we are together, involved in composing a sensitive, respectful and safe environment for everyone, in which judgments are suspended, fears of exposure are dissolved and inhibiting beliefs are gradually re-elaborated. In the poetics of the relationships experienced in the encounters and in the mapping of the narratives, I found resonance with the phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty, described in his Phenomenology of Perception (2014, p. 12-19), in which all perception is perception of the world, and the world is what we perceive, pre- 72 reflectively implicated in the intercorporeality and intersubjectivity of the sensibilities experienced in the game of relations with the other. I also found- in Arnold Berleant's and Georgina Born's proposals for a Social Aesthetics situated in the relationship with art, in DeNora's reflections on the relationship between music and health, and in Steven Feld's ideas about the importance of the repertoire as the soundtrack of an experience composed by all those involved- the harmony and theoretical arguments necessary to understand the relational chain of the different dimensions arising from the shared sensibility in the workshops and their vital contribution to the foundation of the hypotheses initially proposed in this study.

3.1. Social Aesthetics and the Aesthetic Community

Before moving on, it is worth briefly defining three fundamental concepts that underpin Berleant's vision of social aesthetics, central to understanding what will come next: aesthetic experience, aesthetic engagement, and the aesthetic field (BERLEANT, 2010).

3.1.1. Aesthetic experience

Understood by Berleant (2010) as a theory of sensibility, the aesthetic experience is based on the aesthetic domain of experience, rooted in the human, social world (COELHO, 2017). For Berleant, experience is everything: our body, our movements, what touches our skin, sounds, light, temperature, taste, all the sensations that constitute us and that, ultimately, are us. With regard to the notion of aesthetics, and opposed to the Kantian view of disinterested contemplation, Berleant (2010) recovers the etymological meaning of the Greek word Aesthesis, literally, “perception through the senses,” to broaden and deepen its meaning. Thus, aesthetics involves perceptual experience and the ability to recognize it, encompassing what is understood from the perceived. It includes the apprehension of the meanings that emerge from the dynamic interaction between people and with an environment that is alive, not objectified (BERLEANT, 1992). For Berleant (1992), environment and humans make up an indivisible unit: we are shaped by the environment in which we participate, in the same way that we shape it, in a mutual and simultaneous influence, which occurs intertwined in a complex network of relationships, not only sensorial, but sensitive, which includes all human sensibility and emotions, from the bizarre to the erotic, from the disgusting to the attractive, from the beautiful to the sublime, from the ugly to the tragic, from intense love to hate, from the oppressor to the oppressed and so on. In the words of Berleant (2010): I came to recognize that aesthetic is, at is base, a theory of sensibility. So generalized an understanding leads to recognizing an aesthetic dimension in all experience, whether uplifting or demeaning, exalting or brutalizing. (BERLEANT, 2010, p.8) In this way, beyond the arts, aesthetic experience takes us back to the perceptual unity of experience and offers us a more subtle understanding of what happens in the social process. From this perspective, we can understand the aesthetic experience as an “aesthetics of everyday life,” since the flow of life and relationships happens “during,” while we "are."

3.1.2. Aesthetic engagement

Aesthetic engagement refers to an alternative model developed by Berleant to understand the appreciative value of experience (BERLEANT, 1991). It is an intensely sensitive and active somatic state that involves affection and cognition. It is characterized by seven perceptual dimensions that occur simultaneously: acuity, intensity, complexity, subtlety, resonance, cognitive perception and perceptual engagement (COELHO, 2017). Without discussing each of these dimensions, their integrality leads us to an understanding of the appreciative value as that which is intrinsic to the experience and that takes us beyond the senses of separation and division, in such a way that, when we incorporate ourselves into the sensitive field, a continuous exchange is established between all components of the situation (BERLEANT, 2016). For many years, I have been developing an alternative approach to understanding aesthetic value, which I have called “aesthetic engagement.” Rather than using a cognitive model or sociological analysis to explain aesthetic appreciation, my argument is based on analyzing the actual experience of aesthetic appreciation, the experience usually gained from full involvement in a situation that may include a work of art, a performance, an architectural or landscape setting, or a social situation. In aesthetic engagement, there is no separation between the components, but a continuous exchange, in which one acts on the other. (BERLEANT, 2016, my translation) Thus, aesthetic engagement is understood as the most complete stage of aesthetic experience, as it is an “essential aspect of the world in action” (1991), in which our senses are fully immersed in the situation in which it occurs: Engagement is the signal feature of the world of action, of social exchange, of personal and emotional encouters, of play, of cultural movements like romanticism and, as is our claim here, of the direct and powerful experiences that enclose us in situations involving art, nature, or the humam world in intimate and compelling ways. (BERLEANT, 1991, p.44) In the involvement with art, aesthetic engagement is highly intensified by the creation of a perceptive field where feelings and connections are externalized through a sensitive experience that, embodied, includes everything that constitutes us as humans and what we are confronted with in the face of what we discover about ourselves: Art is not like experience, it is not a reflection or an imitation of real life, but it is that very experience in its most direct, forceful presence. Art, thus, is not a pallid reflection of life and of the world but the real thing in its purest and clearest form. When theater is at its best, we experience “the feel of what is true.” We discovered part of the actual experience of being a Jew, a Catholic, a Negro, a Communist, a homosexual, an alcoholic. We realize the power of the great human doubts, passions, crises, and relationship which we all undergo and thus all share. We are more real because other people are more real. We discover an ability, as Blake recognized, “To see the world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wild flower.” (BERLEANT, 2000, p.102)

3.1.3. Aesthetic field

The aesthetic field is made up of all the components of experience, in which all the senses are engaged and in which everyone participates. For Berleant (2000), it is a field composed of a single totality, which includes four main components: the appreciator, that is, the person who experiences the aesthetic value; the focus of appreciation, which can be an object, an artistic work of any nature, a landscape, a thought, a mental image; the activity or event that brings the agent of appreciative focus into existence, such as the artist, processes of nature, the act of identifying the generator of appreciation; the factor that activates the field or situation, such as the performer and 75 the engaged participant: “This is the aesthetic field, the context in which the focus of attention is actively and creatively experienced as valuable” (BERLEANT, 2000).

3.1.4. Aesthetic Community, Social Aesthetics and the “Technology of Us”

With the above concepts defined, we can advance towards the proposition of the social process experienced in the workshops through singing together and its implications for social aesthetics, a fundamental theme in this study. It is a fact that, in the course of singing together, I witnessed the creation of a favorable space for the engagement and acceptance of each one's expression, verified in the context of all the workshops, and confirmed by the participants' reports, which demonstrate it as a sensitive means for the intensification from the perception of oneself and the other, and from which the feeling of integration and belonging to a community emerges, whose main characteristic is the sharing of sensibility, as discussed above. This is in line with Berleant's concept of aesthetic community (1997), in which the feeling of connection, mutuality and reciprocity overcome barriers and separations between participants. For the author, what illuminates the aesthetic meaning of community is a sense of continuity, where everyone is immersed in the sensitive experience: “What makes this aesthetic continuity is the kind of unity that is described as a continuum of body, consciousness, context, where all are united in the pervasive intensity of perceptual experience.” (BERLEANT, 1997). Internal relationships are, in fact, an expression of continuity. The connection between members of an aesthetic community is as real, as much a part of the community, as the people involved themselves. Not only does this community lack sharp boundaries; it has no deep divisions (...) Mutuality and reciprocity among participants in an aesthetic community transcend barriers and separations that characterize other modes of social grouping. (BERLEANT, 1997, p. 149) From this perspective, the experience of aesthetic community in singing together (COELHO, 2017) is intertwined with the psychosocial field of relationships, in such a way that, in the time-space of the workshops, a type of human connection is configured where different modes of being are perceived as possibilities for the invention of new ways of doing. As Merleau-Ponty observes: 76 Is it not evident, precisely if my perception is the perception of the world, that I must find in my commerce with it the reasons that persuade me to see it and, in my vision, the meaning of my vision? (MERLEAUPONTY, 1964, p. 41) As such, the sharing of sensibilities is transported from the meeting space to everyday life, leading me to the concept of Social Aesthetics defended by Berleant (2005), and in which the understanding of aesthetic community is inserted, since it is about the union of the individual with the social, by engaging in art that occurs while making and inventing the way of making (FRAYZE-PEREIRA, 2005 apud COELHO, 2017) and, as part of the unfolding of the dynamics of interactions in the social process, is mutually constitutive. Intensified by singing together, this unity is experienced in a path woven by the values and contexts that intersect in the voices that emerge from the encounter between people who are willing to tread it, and which is presented, in Berleant's understanding, as an "aesthetic of the situation” in which all are artists, insofar as “the creative process is in the participants, who intensify and shape the perceptive characteristics and give them meanings and interpretations” (ANDRIOLO, 2021; ANDRIOLO et al., 2022). But what identifies this type of situation? Like every aesthetic situation, social aesthetics is contextual. In addition, it is highly perceptual, an intense perceptual awareness is the foundation of aesthetics. (BERLEANT apud ANDRIOLO, 2021). Berleant (1994) reaffirms the aesthetic community as a dimension of social aesthetics, in which the sum of an aesthetics of art, an aesthetics of nature and an aesthetics of humans make up the same reality, simultaneously interdependent and multidimensional: A social aesthetics, here, unites an aesthetics of art and an aesthetics of nature with an aesthetics of humans. All three of Buber's worlds— nature, humans and art—are domains of the same aesthetic realm, a remarkable coalescence of diverse orders into a single, far-reaching unit of experience. What science has divided into the natural world, the human world and the mythological world; what philosophy separated into metaphysics, ethics and philosophy of art – all recover their primordial unity in the region of aesthetics. The aesthetic community is a social aesthetic that unites humans and the environment in multidimensional reciprocity. Since the human environment consists not of places and buildings, but of their complex connections with human uses and human participants, an aesthetic community recognizes 77 the social dimension of the environment and the aesthetic conditions of human achievement. (BERLEANT, 1994, p. 12) In parallel to the concept proposed by Berleant, but aligned with him, Georgina Born, British musicologist, musician and honorary professor at the University College of London, offers an understanding of social aesthetics situated in the relationships and influence of art on the social process, especially music. For Born, social aesthetics, primarily, portends that in the relations between humans and objects, the ways of perceiving are incorporated and immersed culturally and socially. In her words: To embrace a social aesthetic, then, is to believe that the aesthetic has meanings far beyond those previously assumed, as a social aesthetic recognizes that our aesthetic narratives and embodied experiences are saturated with social meaning, routinely inscribed to serve the structural goals of multiple social and cultural groups, both in terms of themes of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. In fact, in this sense, social aesthetics presupposes a relational and historically situated conception of aesthetic subjects and objects. (Born 2009, pp. 80-81; cf. Paddison 1993, p. 216) At the same time, arguing that the sensory, perceptual modes of experience, embodied at the core of aesthetic theory, must be understood as immanently enculturated and social, social aesthetics opens up new and expected ways of analyzing one's own aesthetic experiences. (BORN et al., 2017, p. 4) In relation to art, Born (2017) historically situates a new conception of the aesthetic experience based on the expressive artistic and musical movements of the 1960s, including Fluxus, in which John Cage and George Brecht were involved, among other exponents of contemporary music and other artistic modalities, who included in their performances the relationship with the public and the sound environment, turning them into co-authors of the artistic experience. These movements contributed to debates about a relational aesthetic, where art, music and the social process mutually shape each other: Parallel to these advances in academia, since the early 1960s there have been a number of artistic and musical movements – among them Fluxus, performances, installations and multimedia art – that have drawn attention to the ways in which social relations and social situations can participate in aesthetic phenomena or contribute to the aesthetic experience, which has recently culminated in the emergence of critical and theoretical work and curatorial debates on the concept of a relational aesthetic. It is in the wake of these movements in art and music, over half a century, that a new stage in the concpt that sustains 78 a social aesthetic has become necessary, because, together, these movements promoted the recognition not only that art and music are conditioned and shaped by social and cultural aspects in broader processes, but also that art and music have the potential to influence social processes and put them into practice, modeling, organizing and experimenting with new forms of coexistence and social relations of different kinds. In view of this, recent studies in the areas of anthropology and sociology of art and music have proposed that the relationship between art or music and the social must be conceptualized in terms of a bidirectional influence or mutual mediation (Born 2005, 2011, 2012; DeNora, 2003, 2010; Hennion, 1993, 2003). In short, just as social (economic and political) conditions and processes shape art and music, art and music shape social (economic and political) life. (BORN et al., 2017, p. 6) Born (2017) argues that music needs to be understood beyond traditional conceptions that present it as a social mediator and proposes four planes: On the first plane, music produces its own social diversity - within the constitution of microsocieties created by performance, musical practice and in the social relations embodied in musical groups and associations. On the second plane, music has the power to animate communities of interest, bringing its participants together in affective, collective or public bonds potentially based on musical identification and other identifications. On the third plane, music reflects a broader field of social relations, from the most concrete to the most abstract of the collectivity – the musical representation of nations, social hierarchy, or class, race, religion, values, gender or sexuality. On the fourth plane, music is linked to broader institutional forces, which provide the basis for its production, reproduction and transformation, whether sponsored by the elite or by religion, by commercial exchanges or not, subsidized by the public power or by cultural institutions, or by the economic perspective of multipolar cultural investment of late capitalism. The first two planes include social groups, social relations, and the social imaginary that is specifically brought together or constituted by musical practice and experience. In contrast, the last two planes bring together a broader field of social and institutional relations that, by themselves, allow or condition certain types of musical practices, so that these relations and institutions also enter into the nature of the musical experience, permeating musically, in a direct manner, social groups and communities of interest. (BORN. G., 2017, p. 3) With Born's planes in mind, I realized that the experiences in the workshops lie primarily in the first two. However, when looking at the broader field of relations, I see that they are all interconnected, as we take with us everything that permeates our daily lives to any relational experience, such as singing together. Moreover, by integrating the participant's daily life, the musical practice experienced in the workshops offers what Tia DeNora (DENORA, 2007), professor and director of research at the sociology and 79 philosophy of music department at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, called “Technology of the Self,” that is, the acquisition of resources for self-regulation, selfknowledge, personal care, and a feeling of integrity and social integration, mentioned earlier in this study. By expanding the discussion and bringing it within the scope of the relationship between music and health, DeNora (2007) draws attention to the cooperation in corporal perception, which houses the emotional being and the constitution of selfimage, as well as emphasizing music as a technology of the body, as a modality for the cognitive process and for the acquisition of knowledge: This range of emotional regulation and transformation (sometimes as part of an "emotional work") is understood as the cooperation between corporal awareness and the image of how one should feel/appear as an emotional being [Hochschild, 1982], as well as the quality of music as a technology to extend the body, and in the ways in which music works as a model or example for the cognitive process and for the acquisition of knowledge. (DENORA, 2007, p. 227) In the same manner, we can speak of a “Technology of Us.” I leave this designation in quotation marks because the epistemological implications of the uses of the term techné and technology are well known, especially when we are dealing with aesthetics. In my research, singing together is a resource to activate the subject's ability to relate to the other, to see himself and allow himself to be seen, to hear himself and be heard, to touch himself and be touched, in such a way that, in the interweaving with different bodies, he perceives himself as vibrant and connected with himself, in interaction with everyone around him and with everything that makes up the environment around him. With the idea of a “Technology of Us,” I consider the intense and irrefutable relational quality of music through the practice of singing together as a determinant for the creation of a path in which the effects on the subject, described by DeNora (2007), are intertwined, since it is not an isolated and individual event, but an interconnected and collective one, which takes place in a context that is historically situated and pertinent. With this, I arrived at the concept of the psychological sense of community proposed by McMillan and Chavis (1986, apud AMARO, 2007), whose definition is based on the feeling of belonging and well-being among the members of a community from the shared belief that they care about one another and that their needs (exchanges) will be met by the commitment to stay together. The psychological sense of community is composed of four elements: 1) Spirit, with an emphasis on friendship; 2) Trust; 3) Exchange (Trade); 80 and 4) Shared Emotional Connections (Art), where they suggest that art includes values that transcend the community (McMILLAN & CHAVIS, 1986, apud AMARO, 2007, pp. 25-26) and presents itself as an applicable model to any type of community. Without delving too deeply into this concept, I borrow its components related to the feelings of human warmth and intimacy resulting from sharing stories, common places, time together and similar experiences, and which refer to the "amplitude of contact that the individuals in a group have with each other and the quality of these interactions” (McMILLAN & CHAVIS, 1986, p. 9, apud AMARO, 2007, p. 26), to include them in understanding the feelings of belonging and well-being seen in the relationships that forged the aesthetic community during the workshops, as can be verified in the participants' reports. In this way, I include these elements as important factors for understanding the practice of singing together as a “Technology of Us” that contributes to the capacity of the subject and the group to establish and sustain a relationship network of mutual support and significant and beneficial exchanges for all participants. Once again, I reiterate the experience of the workshops as privileged spaces for the sharing of knowledge and political expression in the exercise of a sense of community, in which the mutuality experienced opens the way to new perceptions of oneself and the other by providing a process characterized by the amalgamation of voices that vibrated not only in the acoustic space, but in the sensitive bodies of each participant, which occupied a physical and geographic place, a space and a time that became audible and visible, and public, as the participants touched each other sonorously. I return to Berleant (2004) to reiterate the perception of the body as a receptor and generator of the sensitive experience and connect it with Born's idea of social aesthetics, since it is the body, modeled by relationships, that constitutes the subject in its complexity and sensibility, a body understood aesthetically. We can think of the aesthetic body, then, as culturally shaped, entwined, and embedded in a complex network of relations, each of which has a distinctive character and dynamic. Race, class, genre, and geography are lived through bodily forms and structures, The structures of cultural, racial and social differences are embedded in lived bodies. The aesthetic body, as a receiver and generator of sense experience, is not static or passive but possesses its own dynamic force, even when inactive. Aesthetic embodiment is being fully present through the distinctive presence of the body with the sensory focus and intensity we associate with the experience of art. (BERLEANT, 2004, p. 10 apud COELHO, 2017) 81 In the active incorporation of the world, it is in the body that the voice sings, hears itself and feels itself vibrating. Thus, this aesthetic body, dynamically and constantly shaped by relationships, finds in singing together the possibility of perceiving itself in its expression and understanding its movements. Finally, when examining all the elements discussed above, we can assert that, in the unity of the perceptive experience, the shared sensibility in singing together configures an aesthetic of the situation that is revealed in the corporification of the ways of Being and Doing that each participant discovers in himself when expressing himself, confirming social aesthetics as a qualitative field of human relations.