Musical experience resists reduction to mere physical vibrations

Evidence

If I want to tell you about a heartrending piece of music, phenomenology enables me to describe it as a moving piece of music, rather than as a set of string vibrations and mathematical note relationships on which I have pinned a personal emotion. Melancholy music is melancholy; a sweet air is a sweet air; these descriptions are fundamental to what music is. Indeed, we do talk about music phenomenologically all the time. Even if I describe a sequence of notes as going ‘up’ or ‘down’, this has less to do with what the sound waves are doing (which is becoming more or less frequent, and longer or shorter) than with how the music plays out in my mind. I hear the notes climbing up an invisible ladder. I almost physically rise in my chair as I listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’; my very soul takes flight. That’s not just me: it is what the music is. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 144

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that emotional qualities inhere in experienced objects rather than being pinned-on feelings feeds directly into the later existentialist accounts of mood and atmosphere (Stimmung) that follow in this book. — connects to: Perceived musical qualities like ascending notes reside in experience, not sound waves — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 144; Perceived musical dissonance reduces to roughness from beating partials. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1350; Subjective duration, not physical duration, governs rhythm perception in music — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 1494 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: phenomenology as a method for music criticism — how describing music experientially rather than physically is the only faithful criticism.

Broader Connections

• Perceived musical qualities like ascending notes reside in experience, not sound waves #corroborates (0.92) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 144
• Perceived musical dissonance reduces to roughness from beating partials. #contradicts (0.85) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1350
• Subjective duration, not physical duration, governs rhythm perception in music #corroborates (0.85) — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 1494
• Consonance perception is continuous and not tied to musical intervals #contradicts (0.82) — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 951