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PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2025.2515237 Knowing how to listen: musical professionals listening to music Giulia Lorenzi Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Received 24 January 2025 The idea that musical professionals with extended musical Accepted 29 May 2025 knowledge, training and exposure to musical pieces, can perceive music differently than other listeners - I call this KEYWORDS the Difference Thesis - seems both appealing and proble- Philosophy of music; matic. After showing the flaws of previous accounts that philosophy of perception; attempted to explain it, in this paper, I show how the musical performance; Difference Thesis can be explained by introducing the idea auditory perception that listening is a mental action. I argue that the variety of phenomenologies of music emerges from distinct ways of interacting with musical sounds in the action of listening. I support my claim analysing three scenarios in which perceiv- ing a piece of music is part of day-to-day musical practices, highlighting what musical professionals do and perceive in those contexts. 1. Introduction Musical professionals (composers, conductors, musicians, musical critics, etc.) cover roles that require them to perceive music differently than an ordinary listener who enjoys a piece of music. Writing a critical piece for a newspaper or a musical magazine regarding a recent musical performance, for example, is a task performed by musical professionals. Musical critics, well-established performers, and famous composers are invited by editors to share their impressions and experience of a certain new interpretation or of a new piece of music. In the same way, when a musical competition is organized, judges with specific expertise in music are usually hired to comment on the performances with the goal to select the best performers over different stages of the contest. Musical professionals are experts who can perform a variety of tasks connected with music including some that involve a distinctive type of perception. Indeed, if just musical professionals are trusted to be able to perform tasks requiring perceiving music, we seem CONTACT Giulia Lorenzi giulia.lorenzi.philosophy@gmail.com Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. 2 G. LORENZI justified to think that, in virtue of their training, musical experiences, and exposure to a variety of musical pieces and styles, musical professionals can enjoy a phenomenologically different perception of a piece of music than what other listeners might have access to. I am going to call this the Difference Thesis, namely: Difference Thesis: Musical professionals might perceive music in a saliently phenomenologically different way than other (kinds of) listeners. Yet, pinning down how this phenomenology differs from the one of the other listeners is a quite contentious issue. This might suggest, indeed, an elitist approach to the classification of listeners which I actually want to avoid. In order to reject frameworks that might lean toward elitism, I avoid postulating the existence of (fixed) distinctive classes of listeners. I consider musical professionals and listeners with a low degree of familiarity with music as sitting at the opposite ends of a continuum. I also avoid postulating the existence perceptual abilities exclusively possessed by certain indivi- duals. Instead, I propose an account of the Difference Thesis that is derived by the observation of professional musical practices and that postulates the existence of perceptual abilities that can be developed in different grades and in different numbers (some people might develop several or just few of these abilities) by different listeners. I argue that different sets of gradable (acquired at different levels of effectiveness and precision) abilities exercised in perception give rise to different phenomenologies of music. In other words, musical professionals experience a set of different phenomelogies of music as they possess a set of abilities through which they experience music in significantly different ways. Yet, to explain how worries about elitism can be addressed and how my account could include abilities when it deals with perception, I need to clarify the phenomenon first. What exactly does the perceptual difference consist of? Why does it emerge, if it does at all? An attempt that has been made to find answers to these questions is to account for these phenomenological differences in terms of differences in the type of content of perceptual states. DeBellis (1995) argues that it is the presence of theoretical concepts in the perceptual states of theoretically informed listeners that makes a distinctive phenomenology of music emerge. The concepts coming from musical theory and analysis, in DeBellis’ view, are experienced as “fused” with perceptual-auditory aspects of music in the theoretically informed listeners’ experience. The main problem with DeBellis’ account is, however, its limited applicability. Indeed, DeBellis does not aim at providing an overall understanding of the differences in the perception of music of musical professionals. He does not want to make sense of the Difference Thesis overall. Instead, he focuses his attention in trying to pin down exactly the impact of theoretical musical knowledge on perception. So, his study, even if valuable, ends up being PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 3 applicable to just a certain category of musical professional – those posses- sing theoretical musical knowledge. Additionally, it incurs into the slippery domain of having to clearly distinguish what counts as theoretical knowl- edge of music and explain how that theoretical knowledge on its own (and not other types of training or its connection with other types of training) can have an impact on a perceptual task. Another controversial way to make sense of the Difference Thesis is to approach it considering the case of musical professionals experiencing music in a distinctive way as a case of cognitive penetration. Cognitive penetration is a phenomenon studied both in philosophy (MacPherson, 2012; Zeimbekis & Raftopoulos (ed.), 2015) and psychology (Firestone & Scholl, 2016) and identified in those circumstances in which cognitive processes such as believing, thinking, judging, and knowing have an impact on what people perceive. Circumstances in which new beliefs, pieces of knowledge, or thoughts of a perceiver change what the perceiver feels through any of their senses can be classified as cases of cognitive penetra- tion. Cases that can be considered cases of cognitive penetration are varied. Musicians perceiving music in a distinct way in comparison to other listeners (Churchland, 1988) is a case often debated in circumstances where thinkers try to identify a case of cognitive penetration. Siegel (2010) discusses the case of the ability of botanists and lumberjacks to recognize different types of pine trees, and O’Callaghan (2011) discusses the case of speakers of a certain language who perceive it differently than non-speakers. Yet, going down this road would also mean committing to a certain overall view of perception that is not necessarily appealing for several reasons. Leaving aside the fact that there is no consensus among philosophers and psychologists about the existence of instances of cognitive penetration, embracing the idea that the case of musical professionals distinctively perceiving music might be a case of cogni- tive penetration would leave us with at least two major problems. First, if cognitive penetration is possible and certain types of training or knowledge can impact how it feels to perceive something, we would need to explain how it is possible for certain illusions to still be perceived as presenting entities in misguided ways even after having provided the relevant information about how those entities are in reality to perceivers (J. A. Fodor, 1983; see also DeBellis, 1995). How is it possible, for example, that after seeing it millions of times and knowing perfectly that the two lines are identical, the Muller–Lyer illusion still manages to make one line appear to us as shorter than the other? Second, even if we accept the idea that cognitive penetration is possible, then we have a problem with scien- tific observation. Ideally, we would like to maintain the idea that perception is a reliable source of knowledge, and that it is generally – 4 G. LORENZI in most cases – not defeated (Crane & French, 2017). How can we have epistemically informative and reliable perceptions of the external reality, if everything we perceive might be impacted in a salient way by our belief, knowledge, or training? Here, starting from the assumption that the Difference Thesis is correct and there is a phenomenological difference emerging from the experience of musical professionals, I want to propose one way of mak- ing sense of it that can (1) explain why it is the case that there is a difference in the phenomenology of musical perceptions in musical professionals and (2) avoid the problems of previous attempts. My account also has the advantage of clarifying (at least partially) what is different in the phenomenology of musical professionals, demystifying their experience and explaining it. The anti-exceptionalist character of my framework allows for the experience of musical professionals to be understood in terms of a continuum with other listeners avoiding elitism and making it accessible to whoever would be interested in pursuing the underline training. The difference in phenomenology, in my account, derives from the acquisition of a set of perceptual abilities exercised in perceiving music at different levels of detail and different grades of efficiency. As visually, we can gradually proceed from white to black through a large set of gray nuances, still perceiving the difference between white and black, in musical perception we can go from posses- sing no or limited listening abilities to possessing many which work at a fine level of detail and give rise to the difference in phenomenology. Musical professionals are those people who possess a large set of fine- grained abilities that lead to them experiencing a set of different phe- nomenologies of music. This way, I show that if it might be true that musical professionals can perceive music differently, their unique experi- ence does not have to be understood as neither mysterious nor inaccessible. I argue that phenomenological differences in the perception of music are due to how perceivers interact with music. First, I propose that perceivers do not just merely hear music but listen to it in an active way. In Section 2, I introduce the idea, originally put forward by O’Shaughnessy (2000) and Crowther (2009b), that listening is a mental action that can be carried out in different ways. In Section 3, I suggest that, given that listening is a mental action, it can be performed in different ways following different types of know-how. In Section 4, scrutinizing distinct circumstances in which musi- cal professionals listen to music, I show that the ways in which musical professionals have learnt (in different ways, through different channels and training) to listen to music shape how they perceive musical pieces. In Section 5, I reply to an objection. PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 5 2. Listening as a mental action In this section, I start my reasoning by clarifying what I mean for listening to be a mental action and what is its relationship with hearing. The notions of listening and hearing ground my account and allow me to explain how know-how can inform the action of listening and lead to different percep- tual experiences. 2.1. Listening and hearing: a difference in nature In philosophy of mind, starting from different points of view, O’Shaughnessy (2000, Ch. 5 and 14) and Crowther (2009a, 2009b) develop district accounts of listening, as well as different understandings of the relationship between listening and hearing. Yet, despite their different takes, O’Shaughnessy and Crowther agree on the basic characterization, which is useful for me, that listening is a kind of mental action (something that an agent can do and cannot merely happen to someone), and that listening somehow implies hearing. I take these two to be the ideas that allow me to move forward. Traditionally, in the philosophy of action, philosophers have distin- guished actions from mere happenings (Moya, 1991, pp. 1–14). A case such as Adam raising his arm to reach the jar of marmalade on the top shelf of the cupboard to make himself breakfast is considered an action, whereas a case such as Tim’s raising an arm being bumped into by the person standing next to him while on a crowded bus is considered a mere happening. Both actions and happenings are events, something which takes place and unfolds over time. Yet, something is crucially different in these two cases. An action such as Adam’s raising his arm is something for which the agent would take responsibility for. Adam could be blamed or praised, or more generally considered responsible for raising his arm. Raising an arm in the first case is something that Adam is responsible for, while in Tim’s case, it is something that just merely happened to a part of his body. One way of thinking about this difference is that the origin of these events is what signals the difference in nature between one and the other. Their causes distinguish the actions from happening. In Adam’s case, raising an arm is caused by a certain mental state (maybe an intention) that Adam has, and which leads to the action. Furthermore, in Adam’s case, the action of raising an arm is explained and rationalized in the terms of that mental state. If asked about his raising an arm, Adam would reply explaining that he did raise his arm because he wanted to, he had the intention, he decided to get to the jar of marmalade on the top of the shelf. On the contrary, Tim’s arm moved without Tim’s agential initiative, the arm moved independently of his owner. Tim would never rationalize and explain the raising of his arm as 6 G. LORENZI something that he did or did for a certain reason, following a certain intention or a desire or a similar mental state, neither he would say that he acted for it or initiate it. Mere happenings are events on which agents do not present a certain form of control over, while actions are somehow caused by agents’ mental states and are also rationalized and motivated by agents in the light of those mental states. Crowther (2009b), p. 174), recalling Vendler (1957), identifies in the opportunity of perceivers to carry out listening in a way or another a signal of the fact that listening is an agential process and that therefore it is an action and not a mere happening. In other words, the fact that listening can appear as having different ways and “hows” signals that it is subject to someone’s agential initiative. A perceiver such as a listener sitting in a theater can listen to a concert distractedly, absentmindedly, or inconsis- tently. In other moments, the same perceiver can listen passionately, inten- sely, or enthusiastically. A listener, namely a perceiver who engages with the auditory reality which surrounds them and who keeps listening, is in the position to carry out the listening in different ways. To listen to sounds or to a musical piece, a perceiver has to do something, and keep doing it over time while they continue to focus on their auditory scene, and they can act on how to do it, namely on how to carry out the action that they are engaged with (e.g., enthusiastically or distractedly). Listening, in other words, is an event that can be qualified by adverbs that also qualify actions (see also Ryle, 1949). In contrast (see again for this a specific remark by Vendler 1957), a perceiver who is not a listener, namely a perceiver who just happens to hear a concert, cannot do it passionately or distractedly, absentmindedly, or enthusiastically. Someone who is merely hearing a piece of music or a sound, like someone who is merely seeing my cup of tea on my desk, is not doing it in a certain way, nor they are doing it in any particular way. Hearing does not require or entail any agential input or mental state in order to happen. It does not show different ways, “how to”, or methods, and it does not show to be conducted through other agential inputs or thanks to an agential mental state. A perceiver can even be annoyed by hearing a sound or a piece of music and would possibly and gladly prevent that to happen if they could. Think, for example, of that time when your neighbors were listening to loud music played on their radio, and you could not help but hear it yourself too. You did not have any mental states which lead to listening or paying attention to that music. You did not want to listen to the music, you did not have that intention to do it. You just ended up enduring the circumstances caused by your neighbors’ listening to that music out loud, hearing, consequently, their chosen music. Granted that a perceiver possesses a functioning auditory system, hearing just happens, non- agentially. Thus, for this reason, it cannot be an action. PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 7 Since it does not require an overt physical implementation such as the presence of a limb (to rise), listening is taken to be a mental action, namely a process that is carried out by agents entirely in their mind, and that doesn’t require doing anything with one’s body. The nature of what is going on in the perceivers’ mind is what provides a finer grained view of the metaphy- sics of listening as an action and differs from author to author. O’Shaughnessy defines listening as “active attending” (2000, ch.14, p. 387), namely as the mental act of deliberately paying attention to some auditory stimuli. In his framework, it seems a natural way of describing a perceiver listening to a sound as someone who is paying attention to that auditory element that they decided to engage with (in O’Shaughnessy’s formulation, attention must be understood as the ability of a sound to fill in the vacuum created by the perceivers’ desires (O’Shaughnessy, 2000, p. 399)). Focusing on the precise case of listening to an object, understood as a source of sounds, Crowther prefers, instead, to define listening as the process happen- ing over time of “maintaining aural perceptual awareness” (Crowther, 2009b, p. 184) of that object. These accounts of listening as an action clearly match Levinson’s attempt to describe the distinctive auditory experience of an audience listening to a musical piece over time. Levinson’s work of analyzing the experience of perceiving music as an experience unfolding over time presents perceiving music as implying some same salient features that the notions of listening and hearing have displayed. This gives us another reason to think that those notions are the ones in the light of which further aspects of the musical experience can be explained. In Levinson’s (1997) words, the experience of a listener of a piece of music is the “attentive absorption in the musical present” (Levinson 1997, p.23) or the activity of “follow[ing] music to which he is listening, (. . .) or tracking it as it eventuates in time” (Levinson 1997, p.23) or, even more clearly, “a process in which conscious attention is carried to a small stretch of music surrounding the present moment” (Levinson 1997, p.18). Also in Levinson’s analysis then, the perceiver listening to music engages with it in a certain way. They “absorb the present”, “follow the music”, “track” what is happening over time or “carry out a process” with “conscious attention”. In other words, also in Levinson’s account, the perceiver is an agent and is doing something while listening to music. However, Levinson calls this experience “quasi – hearing”, coining a new term, and, this way, missing the chance to link the perception of music with the framework that philo- sophy of action can bring in this context. He thus misses out on the potentially enlightening consequences that I intend to showcase studying the case of musical professionals. Besides the fine-grained details, the general philosophical consensus is, nonetheless, to consider listening as a mental action, carried out in the 8 G. LORENZI agents’ mind as a result of an agential input and directed toward auditory entities. In the remainder of this work, I use this general notion as a crucial element to understand the experience of musical professionals perceiving music. I take it that musical professionals do not merely hear pieces of music, but that they listen to them, and that in their act of listening to those pieces, their different ways to engage with them allow the emergence of a distinct phenomenology. 2.2. Listening out and listening to I want to explain the Difference Thesis on the basis of the appreciation of listening as a type of perceptual action distinguishing it from hearing as a form of passive perceptual experience. Introducing the notion of listening (which is not the standard understanding of perceptual instances) will give me the chance of characterizing a type of auditory experience that it does not just apply to musical professionals, but it is helpful to understand their distinctive case. I Yet, before proceeding, I need to clarify some other details concerning the nature of the relationship between listening and hearing, and the forms in which listening can present itself that are helpful to explain the case of musical professionals. Both O’Shaughnessy (2000) and Crowther (2009b) take it that listening entails hearing in some sense. This seems to follow the intuitive idea that when perceivers listen to something, say their mother speaking to them, they also hear it. There doesn’t seem to be examples of cases when perceivers just listen without, automatically, also hearing that something they are listening to. Indeed, as soon as a perceiver starts listening to, say, a piece of music, it is impossible for them, granted the absence of external barriers and factors such as a physical object screening the sounds for them or a sudden illness impairing their ears or preventing their auditory system to work properly, to not also automatically hear that piece of music. On the other hand, there are situations where the mere experience of hearing occurs in isolation from listening. Yet, even if the two accounts by O’Shaughnessy and Crowther agree on the fact that listening entails hearing, they present some interesting nuances regarding the understanding of their relationship. O’Shaughnessy considers the hearing entailed by listening as (at least probabilistically) causally pro- duced by the act of listening (or will to listen) (O’Shaughnessy, 2000, p. 392). The hearing co-present with listening, in other words, is the non-active and non-identical part of hearing that occurs in virtue of the willing to listen (O’Shaughnessy, 2000, p. 392–393, theory C and D) in this framework. Crowther, instead, does not recognize a causal, instrumental relationship between listening and hearing. Crowther believes that listening does not cause hearing. PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 9 About the relation between listening and hearing Crowther states: (. . .) listening entails hearing because to listen to O [sound-producer] is to agentially maintain aural perceptual contact with (i.e. hearing of) O throughout a period of time with the aim of knowing what it is doing. But a subject cannot have engaged in a process of preserving or maintaining perceptual contact with O throughout some period of time without there being some condition of hearing being maintained (Crowther, 2009b, p. 187). As Crowther himself points out, the difference between his position and O’Shaughnessy’s stays in the absence of a causal relation between listening and hearing. In Crowther’s view, listening does not cause hearing but is its maintenance (Crowther, 2009b, p. 187). Indeed, listening to a certain sound-source is not an accomplishment that can be reached in his account. When perceivers listen to something through a certain period of time, they are also hearing something during the same time frame. Thus, in Crowther’s take, it is not possible to consider listening as an action that causes hearing and, consequently, ends at the beginning of the state of hearing. On the contrary, he suggests that we should take listening and hearing as contem- porary and co-present. In Crowther’s work, the rough idea that listening somehow entails hear- ing is preserved. Yet, it is from Crowther’s study of the temporal dimension of listening and hearing that his account develops further nuances in explaining the nature of listening and hearing and their relationship. In his analysis, Crowther uses Rothstein (2004)’s distinction among “telic” and “atelic” activities to employ it in the context of perceptual actions. The terminology comes from the employment of the ancient Greek word τέλος that means “goal”, “aim”, “fulfilment”, but also, more relevantly here, “end”. Thus, telic actions are the ones that aim at a specific end, or, in other words, that possess a clear endpoint in time. On the contrary, atelic activities are the ones that extend over a period of time and can keep going indefinitely. This is why, in his account, Crowther generally characterizes listening as an atelic process, which does not end, but it is co-present with hearing. What is interesting for me here is that Crowther argues that we can also have a telic version of the act of listening: a listening out for (Crowther, 2009b, p. 187) that can be fulfilled in the act of hearing the activity of the sound sources selected. In this case, the listening out for (contrasted by the atelic process of listening: listening to) comes to an end when the perceiver manages to grasp the information related to that sound source, namely when the perceiver hears about that activity and then stops doing that. Crowther also believes that there can be situations in which telic and atelic versions of listening interact with each other in interesting ways. Indeed, he suggests that during an atelic process of listening to a certain 10 G. LORENZI sound producer, it can happen that telic auditory acts also occur. In cases in which the auditory scenario is composed by different sound events or sound sources or a sound event displays multiple features, while we are listening to it we can also listen out for a specific further component or voice. For example, this is exactly what happens when students listen to a lecture: they are listening to the teacher’s speech, but also listening out for the auditory signal of the end of the lesson (i.e., the school bell signal or the teacher’s statement of the end of the activities). This possible combination between these two versions of the perceptual aural activity (listening) plays a crucial role in understanding the experience of musical professionals listening to music as I explain further in analyzing the emergence of the phenomenology of perceiving musical pieces in Section 4. The distinction that I embraced between listening and hearing allows me to move my explanation from the realm of perception to the realm of action, avoiding clashes with the understanding of perception in passive, neutral terms, in order to save its objective epistemic function and avoid additional problems in understanding phenomenological oddities concerning cases of illusions (Churchland, 1988; Fodor, 1983, 1988). Using the notion of listen- ing allows me to offer an alternative explanation of the experience of musical professionals, avoiding the controversies that come from adopting the explanation based on the idea of cognitive penetration (see again the introduction – Section 1). In the realm of an action, indeed, different mental states such as knowledge and beliefs are unproblematically understood as possible factors of influence of actions. This allows for musical profes- sionals’ training and knowledge to have an impact on the perception of music in an uncontroversial and unproblematic way. Allowing for occur- rences of passive states, such as hearing, to happen independently from mental actions leaves room for the existence of occurrences of perception not impacted by knowledge, goals, desires, or any other mental state. The fact that there can be cases where perceivers perceive without doing it in any way means that there are cases where perception is neutral and is not shaped, changed, influenced, or impacted by anything else. At the same time, I can explain the cases of illusions such as the percep- tion of Muller–Lyer’s illusion as resisting a change in phenomenology as a case (which is usually used as an argument against cognitive penetration for the lack of impact of knowledge on phenomenology) where the object of the perception does not allow a different way of conducting the mental action of looking at it. The illusion generates from the fact that there is not a different way to act, namely to observe, watch, or look at that object, than the one that makes us see the two lines being unequal. The nature of the object that is perceived does not allow perceivers, even when provided with further information, to look at it in a different way and perceive it in a different way. PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 11 Additionally, understanding listening as a mental action allows me to recognize the existence of a variety of forms that it can take and a variety of ways in which it can be performed. A mental action can be exercised in different ways (e.g., absentmindedly, accurately, and intensely) and with different degrees of effectiveness and sophistication (e.g., effectively and barely). Moreover, I can follow Crowther embracing the distinction that he draws between listening out for and listening to as different forms of listening which allows me to provide an explanation of the nuances of the phenom- enology of the auditory experience of musical professionals. Musical profes- sionals, indeed, employ different ways of engaging with musical pieces. At different times, they listen to certain aspects of the musical piece, while they also listen out for other auditory elements to appear. I explore this in more depth in Section 4. 3. Listening as an action informed by know-how So far, I have introduced the notion of listening as a mental action. I have taken it that musical professionals do not merely hear a piece of music but engage with it by listening to it. (This does not mean that perceivers others than musical professionals do not also listen to music and are confined to merely hearing music. Yet, I am focusing here in explaining what happens in the experience of musical professionals perceiving music. So here I am merely characterizing the experience on the light of the difference in perceptual occurrences that I have introduced above). I have explained what a mental action is and borrowed from Crowther’s work the distinction between two different forms of listening - listening to and listening out for. Now, I want to introduce the idea that musical professionals guide their action through what we might classify as a kind of procedural knowledge or know-how (Fantl, 2008, p. 451). This is the type of knowledge that allows agents to build a paper crane or ride a bike; people generally acquire this type of knowledge through tries, attempts, and experiences. Take the case of a kid wanting to learn how to ride a bike. What they do to achieve their goal is grab a bike and try out different strategies of how to stay on it balancing their weight, moving the pedals to go faster or slower, move the handlebar to change direction and so on. Practical knowledge is usually understood to be in contraposition with propositional knowledge, or in other words, “knowing-that”. This other type of knowledge is knowledge of facts and information. Traditionally, knowing-how is thought to have a certain relation- ship with abilities (Ryle, 1949). Knowing-how to do something sug- gests (Fantl, 2008, p. 451) that the agent displaying it possesses the ability to do it. In other words, possessing practical or procedural knowledge about doing something consists of the agent having the 12 G. LORENZI ability to do those activities. In more concrete terms, it is common to say of the kid that is riding a bike that they have acquired the ability to do so. The kid that is riding a bike right now, and displays the relevant know-how to ride a bike, is taken to possess the ability to ride the bike (now and in the future). What I want to suggest is that when musical professionals engage with music in the act of listening, they manifest a form of know-how, and a set of abilities. In other words, musical professionals possess a set of abilities, a know-how, that is displayed in their engagement with musical pieces and manifested in their performance of certain activities (I will delve into this in more detail later, in Section 4). The fact that musical professionals demonstrate being able, in distinct circumstances, to listen to evaluate a performance, or listen to tran- scribe a melody or listen to write an arrangement, and that they describe their experiences in different ways, highlighting a distinct phenomenology of music in each case, mean that they have acquired a set of abilities that allows them to perform those actions now and in the future. I don’t want to take a hard stance on the intellectualist/anti- intellectualist debate here, namely I do not want to decide if there is an order of priority and reduction between know-that and know- how. My only claim is that the kind of knowledge (broadly speaking) that musical professionals manifest can often be correlated with the possession of certain abilities. This is something that both intellectu- alists and anti-intellectualist can endorse. What I hold here is a minimal take which considers that, in the experience of music, perceivers do not primarily engage with musical pieces making judgments. In more concrete terms, a musical professional listening to Beethoven’s 5th symphony does not sit in a concert hall or a theater, engaging with sounds, primarily dedicating their mental efforts to create propositions about the musical pieces. They do not think that the one that they are experiencing “is the famous theme which displays the repetition of the first note, one, two, three times and then, the change to a lower note occurs”. They are more likely to sit in the concert hall listening out for a certain theme to appear, listening to a certain motif, focusing their auditory awareness on structural or expressive elements, listening to interpretative choices, recognizing pitches and so on. This is the extent in which I am interested in characterizing what guides the action of musical professionals listening to musical pieces as a form of knowing-how or as a set of abilities. Deciding if this can be redescribed in terms of knowing-that or if a bit of knowing-that is required to start off with the experience of music is something that goes beyond the scope of my present work. PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 13 4. Knowing how to listen: musical professionals listening to music and their phenomenology In this section, I explore the experience of musical professionals in more detail. My move here should be natural after what I have discussed in the previous sections. I will show that musical professionals, having acquired distinctive know-how through the specific musical training that they have received and exposure to different types of music, end up possessing a broad set of abilities related to the engagement with musical pieces, which they employ in different circumstances. I argue that musical professionals are able to listen to musical pieces in various ways and that this allows for the emergence of distinct phenomenologies of music. To support my argument, I consider some real cases of musical practices that involve musical perception and I reconstruct what musical profes- sionals do and perceive. The list of experiences that I take in consideration is not exhaustive, and it does not attempt to summarize the full range of occasions in which the perception of music is involved in musical profes- sional settings. I select three distinct cases in which musical professionals listen to music that are common in musical practice. This analysis shows that my account is able to explain the Difference Thesis and account for the existence of a variety of phenomenologies of music. 4.1. Case 1 – musical professionals listening to evaluate a new performance of a known piece of music Let’s consider the case of a classical musician presented with a new perfor- mance of a well-known piece as it happens in the context of musical competition. In the case of wind-orchestra festivals, for example, there is a panel of musical professionals which is required to listen to a certain musical piece (the same for every group) performed by several ensembles of the same type and of the same level of ability playing one after another. In listening to the performance, the musician, member of the judging panel, aims at understanding if the performance is convincing, coherent and adds something to the discography already recorded. They listen to how structural and constitutive elements, such as rhythm, melody, harmony, and the musical form, are performed in this specific instance. They also listen out for variations from standard, well recognized, historical performances of the piece in the expressive components such as timbre, dynamics, and articulations (see Pratt et al. 1990 for an idea of the variety of elements we can be aware of). The musician’s goal here is not to notice the presence of certain elements of the piece. Indeed, they already know that those elements are there. It is the uniqueness and the novelty of execution of any elements that they are after here, listening out for them. 14 G. LORENZI Let me analyze a case where the musical materials are quite minimal to be able to show more concretely what this musician would do in this case. Take, for example, the case of Hardy Mertens’ “Variazioni symphoniche su non potho reposare” and, in specific, the clarinet's solo three measures before box number 31 in the score. Three measures before box 31, the clarinet’s solo (no other instrument is playing with this) leads listeners through the closure of a melodic line to a change in the harmony. The piece goes on, representing a motif that listeners have already heard, but in a different tonality and with the appearance of a dialog between two main parts (played by the first oboe and a group of other three instruments). The tonal atmosphere following from box 31 is completely different from that in the previous section of the piece. What a musical professional does in the case at hand is to pay attention to the elements which convey musical expressiveness and a certain interpreta- tion of the musical idea. They listen out for the aggressiveness of the articulation of the first note of the clarinet, the smoothness of the perfor- mance of the melodic descendent line, and the gradual change in the dynamic over the diminuendo. In the last crotchet before 31, the musician listens out for the way in which other performers join the clarinet harmo- nizing the end of the passage and listens to the weight and relevance given to the note introducing tension and instability in the tonal area. Knowing how a passage that moves from a tonality to another works, a musical profes- sional then listens out for the arrival of the resolution in the first measure after 31, and its performance (namely looking out for the choices of dynamics and articulations). To summarize, the musician starts listening to the articulation, moving then on to the melody, the dynamic, and finally the harmonic component of the piece. While they listen to this musical component, they keep listening out for the uniqueness and novelty of their presentation in this specific performance of the piece. At a different level, a musical professional might want to listen to the interpretation of larger structural elements of the piece. In the example, which is a piece in the form of a theme and variations, a musical professional who is interested in appreciating this specific performance of the piece, would listen out for the decisions made by performers on how to reproduce changes of motifs and melodies. In other words, they would listen out for the ways in which the introduction of the variations of the theme are presented and how previous passages are repeated. The musical professional would listen to and listen out for elements such as the reappearance of the melody in a different tonality, or played with a different timbre or with different articulation, or broken into a dialogue between two or more instruments, or rearranged with the presence of a countermelody, or enriched by some other melodic components or ornaments. PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 15 In the case of the segment of music that I focused on in the example, after appreciating the modulation to which the clarinet’s solo led to, the musician would listen out for the modality of the reappearance of the motif played by the first cello listening out for the specific implementation of the variations at the level of instrumenta- tion, meter, harmony, and texture after the modulation that they perceived at 31. They would listen out for how the cello connects its version of the same motif played by the clarinet to the rest of the piece. They would be interested in listening to the motif to find out if the cellist decided to put some emphasis on the different timbre, or on the change in harmony, or if, on the contrary, they decided to smooth some difference and, instead, highlight the similarities with the clarinet’s solo – maybe valuing coherence over novelty in this bit of the piece. On the basis of their listening experience, the musician is able to assess a performance, noting how performers have highlighted and foregrounded – to a greater or lesser extent – the expressive, formal, and structural elements for their audience with the intention of guid- ing their attention bit after bit. They formulate a judgment that also considers if and how performers have created a coherent interpreta- tion of the form of the piece, clearly highlighting internal relations between different passages and musical materials. The phenomenology of this experience is very rich and implies the perception of expressive and structural elements of the piece at small and large scales in the context of the piece itself. The listener perceives the theme and variation as a theme and variation, listening to the repetitions of the themes and the reappearance of motifs and their more or less accentuated diversification or similarity. They also per- ceive how the performers conveyed the sense of direction of a certain passage, communicated tension or relaxation, and aggressiveness or peace. They perceive, more or less on the base of the interpretative choices of the orchestra, the tension in listening out for the harmonic resolution or the calmness and distension while listening to the, more or less coherent, development of the melody. In short, this phenomen- ology includes full appreciation of the piece as that piece of music, with all the musical expressiveness and communicative elements implied in it. In addition, given the evaluative goal of the listening task at hand, the perception here also includes a highlight and a focus on the novel and unique interpretative features of this distinct occurrence of the piece. Things such as the use of (maybe) extreme dynamics, or effective articulation, or emphatic focus on some harmonies, are also part of the phenomenology of the musical professional listening to evaluate a performance. 16 G. LORENZI 4.2. Case 2 – musical professionals listening to write an arrangement (the experience of listening analytically) In other circumstances, the same musician may want to write an arrange- ment for their brass quintet of a piece that was originally written for an orchestra. In this case, their main focus does not lie on what the musical interpretation and its implementation is, but, on understanding the piece both at the expressive and structural level in the finest details, with the goal to capture absolutely all the elements involved. They want to make sure that they can grasp all the structural and expressive elements present at any point, because they need to make decisions on what to keep and what to cut in their reduction of the piece. They also focus on instrumental techniques, ranges, and expressive possibilities, in other terms, on orchestration. They want to know what the original instruments playing a certain part are and what they can achieve musically speaking. This enables them to decide which instrument available in the brass quintet can possibly achieve the same musical results as the original. In this case, the musician’s work is to auditorily dissect the piece into its elements: the purely rhythmic components, the merely harmonic elements, the melodic line(s), and the ornaments and decorative elements, and then, notice their interactions. In order to do so, they systematically listen to the piece multiple times, and they focus their attention exclusively on different constituents of the piece each time that they replay it. To start, they might attend to the melody, for example, then they focus on the purely rhythmic elements – they can be the percussions’ part, or parts of other instruments, such as, for example, the “ta-cha-cha” (1–2–3, 1–2–3) pattern played by alternating brass instruments in a waltz – (they also notice how these enrich the melody that they already analyzed). At the time of another replay, they attend to how harmony is constructed and how it supports and contributes to melody and rhythmic elements. While focusing on an element of the piece at a time, they also consider what types of expressive qualities are necessary for each element. They consider things such as the range that a certain part would require (how high or low its pitches are), what type of articulation should be used for a certain element, what dynamic is necessary for another musical component to convey the same expressive message that it was originally intended to be communicated. The result is a listening experience which corresponds to an auditory analytical analysis of the elements at play. In other words, the musician’s experience is a perceptual equivalent of a conductor’s analysis of the score of a composition with elements of orchestration and appreciation of specific instrumental techni- cal possibilities. The work of creating an arrangement does not clearly end with the perceptual experience (for a broader understanding about how to write an PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 17 arrangement, see Russell, 1954). On the contrary, listening to the piece is usually just the initial step of a broader musical task (see again Russell, 1954). However, when the goal of the action of listening is to create an arrangement, the shape of the action of listening is different from in the experience of listening to evaluate a performance. The listening employed in this context is often referred to as a practice that should be carried out “analytically” (Russell, 1954, p. 53) and is about getting to know all the components of the piece. The phenomenology of this type of listening experience is not the one of merely focusing on the rhythm at sometimes or noticing the harmony in other moments. It is a consistent and systematic practice of auditory select- ing and following in turns all the elements. The listener perceives a series of musical streams (that together create the piece of music), first in isolation, and then appreciates the complexity of their interaction than other listeners would generally not experience. The listener can potentially still enjoy the musical piece as that piece, but they experience it as coming from the interactions of various different elements combined with each other. The listening experience of an arranger is similar to a person reconstructing a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces of a visual scene. The person takes them one at a time, ponders the different pieces first to understand what they repre- sent as a piece of what possible element in the visual image, and they then start to put them together to reconstruct the look of objects, people, or the environment. Even at the end, looking at the complete puzzle, they are able to appreciate the final scene as emerging from the small pieces patiently arranged in a certain way. This type of phenomenology emerges just in the case in which the listener exercises the ability of systematically and consis- tently dissect the piece following each element and then appreciating their interaction. As just if you notice the pieces of the puzzle, you can appreciate their interaction in building the overall picture. 4.3. Case 3 – musical professionals listening to transcribe a melody (the experience of listening recognizing rhythms and inferring pitches and intervals) The experience of transcribing a melody by ear is a task usually called “dictation” and required by traditional musical training (Warburton, 1967, pp. 35–36, for a critical take on this practice see “Introduction” in Pratt et al. (1990)). Skills developed with training on dictation can be useful when a musical professional wants to note down a melody for themselves or for someone else to play. Say, for example, that one of their students wants to play the main line of a song used in a commercial advertisement or a theme song of a TV show. In this case, our classical musician listens to keep track of the rhythmic distribution of the sounds and their pitches. 18 G. LORENZI I assume here that the musician at hand does not have absolute pitch. To proceed, they initially split the melody in chunks, listening, more than once, to just one single bit of a few seconds (in training exercises, usually no more than two measures). This is done to memorize the fragment in order to be able to mentally sing it. They then move forward focusing on studying the distance, in terms of intervals, between the first two sounds. Once they are confident of the pitches that they are working with, they mentally sing the same bit of the piece again and work out the duration of the two sounds. They proceed repeating the same mental task for all the sounds present in the first chunk of the melody that they selected, before moving to the following portion. The phenomenology of that piece of music as that piece is not available to the perceiver here. It is disrupted by the process I explained above, of figuring out the pitches involved, and their temporal length to write the melody down. The chunks are perceived as a fragment of a movement, or the steps of a journey toward an unknown direction or destination. Yet, here it is not possible for the musician to fully appreciate the flow of the piece given the need to engage with short bits that need to be memorized and analyzed in their atomic components. When the musician listens to the first two measures of the melody to pay attention to pitches, they lose track of the other components of the piece and of their exact location in relation to the bigger structure. They do not perceive the meter of the composition, for example. They do not perceive a modulation as a modulation either in this context. They listen to the relation between a note and another and, in doing so, they miss the chance to perceive the structural relevance of the bridge from one tonality to another. They do not listen out for recursive elements or motifs, or for dynamics and other expressive aspects. Thus, those elements are not a salient part of their phenomenology. This narrows down the scope of their musical experience, limiting their phenomenology. What they perceive are fragments of musical melody, further dismantled in the analysis of intervals and rhythms. As Pratt and his collaborators notice in the introduction of their book on aural awareness (Pratt et al. 1990, pp. 1–5) while commenting on “dictation” as an element of the traditional musical ear training, many musicians do not find musical dictation very helpful in their day-to-day professional practice, and they do not use it very often. Dictation is a very specific way of engaging with music, aimed at a quite specific goal which does not allow for broader use. Yet, Pratt and colleagues note that “dictation” is just one of the possible ways of engaging with music highlighting the opportunity to develop other perceptual abilities through alternative practice for ear training (the very motivation of their work). PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 19 The work of Pratt and colleagues is not an isolated case of a guide which aims to teach more or less previously trained listeners other ways to engage with sounds (for works aimed at developing listening in a certain way see, for example, Copland, 1957; Oliveros, 2005; Powell, 2010). These guides for listeners teach how to differently engage with different musical elements at different times to reach different perceptual goals. Through both perceptual exercises and theoretical information, listeners learn to listen out for or listen to certain elements over others zooming in on them. They do so to perceive the big structure of a musical piece while also appreciating the interaction between melodic lines or melodic and rhythmic and harmonic components. They also learn how to auditorily chunk a piece of music in smaller bits for further analysis, and/or how to draw inferences on pitch locations, noticing their relative positions, etc. Other works, such as Casini’s (2007), aimed at a more generalist audi- ence, focus on different musical elements and abilities, for example, to allow people to distinguish good from bad performances of an Aria from an Opera or to appreciate different performances of an instrumental piece of music comparing and contrasting the one to another. The existence of works focused on teaching ways of engaging with sounds and of musical practices implying and involving different abilities of listen- ing to musical pieces, stand as evidence that there are different ways of listening and different phenomenologies among both musical professionals and nonprofessionally trained listeners. The variety of musical experiences available to musical professionals are also proven to be at the reach of other listeners thanks to guides such as Casini’s (2007). Once perceivers learn how to engage with musical pieces in certain ways, they are led to experience distinctive phenomenologies. The set of musical experiences is not classifi- able in terms of better or worse, or more or less valuable in abstractum. These diverse ways of engaging with music and, consequently, phenomen- ologically perceiving it in diverse ways are nonetheless distinct, and they fit different goals and purposes. 5. Objection: can’t this be just perceptual learning? Someone might object that an easy way to account for the Difference Thesis comes from psychology through the phenomenon called perceptual learn- ing. Rather than taking it that there is a form of knowledge that shapes an action whose exercise makes a distinctive phenomenology emerge, as I argued, one could argue that the phenomenology of the perception of a musical piece for musical professionals changes thanks to a change at a perceptual level happening through repeated experience. Following this route would mean locating the difference at the hearing level. First, this would require a different characterization of the experience of musical 20 G. LORENZI professionals than the one provided in Section 4 as the absence of a (mental) action (listening) would entail the absence of different ways and different abilities to exercise it. So, the phenomenon would require a different description and framework, while possibly not missing out in elements that I have identified above. Second, this would mean considering the case of musical professionals as analogous to cases such as the one of a chicken sexer who automatically perceives certain bodily features of the chickens that an inexperienced person does not perceive. This happens thanks to these people’s repeated perception of those features over time (see for a similar case regarding pine trees Siegel, 2010). The chicken sexer can consequently judge which sex the animals are even if they have never been told explicitly about different bodily features of the chickens. However, this analogy might not hold and the characterization of the experience of musical professionals under this framework might not capture the elements that I individuated in the case of musical professionals perceiving music, as I show below. In drawing a line on the research conducted on this area until that moment, stabilizing the understanding of the case, Gibson (1963) defines perceptual learning as “any relatively permanent and consistent change in the perception of a stimulus array, following practice or experience”. Gibson recognizes three main aspects in this phenomenon: (1) its perceptual nature (in her words “not imagination or hallucination or guessing”), (2) the presence of a training-learning process, (3) the stable, temporally “perma- nent” nature of the changes involved. This way Gibson aims at restricting her view to the salient cases, leaving aside those situations where changes in tastes and judgments are reported, or where external material factors such a surgery or a new prothesis modified the perceptual system of a perceiver, or where the change was not a real change and just a temporary, short-living variation. Given that the case of the musical professionals listening to music possesses all these three elements of the definition, let’s briefly analyze our case in the light of perceptual learning. In his taxonomic work, Goldstone (1998) individuates four main types of mechanisms in perceptual learning: (1) Differentiation, (2) Stimulus Imprinting, (3) Unitization, (4) Attentional Weighting. What do these mechanisms do, and can I individuate instantiations of them in the musical training? Differentiation is usually exemplified in the case of the sommelier who can distinguish the upper and lower halves of a bottle of wine. This mechanism is what allows perceivers to perceive different elements or features, whereas usually untrained people can experience just one element. In the musical realm, an analog of this case can be individuated in the capacity to perceive small variation in intonation. Consider, for example, notes that are vaguely sharper and flatter than their ideal in-tune version of PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 21 the same pitch, an inexperienced ear would not recognize such a small, less than a quarter of a tune, variation in the intonation. Trained listeners, instead, hear two different sounds on the basis of that small variation. Stimulus imprinting is the mechanism of considering complex entities such as faces, made of different distinct and unique elements and features, as distinct and unique wholes, and consequently be in the position to judge their identity (Goldstone 1998). In this case, what the perceiver learns to do is to quickly recognize elements that are complex and made of different, still unique, elements, as a distinct whole, i.e., as a unique entity easily and rapidly recognizable. An analog in the musical case can be the recognition of familiar melodies (e.g., Happy Birthday) which are constituted by several notes and intervals, and, yet, they are perceived as unitary, distinct, and recognizable entities. Cases of unitization represent the opposite of the ones of differentiation. In this case, perceivers are dealing with the mechanism that allows them to grasp as a single element a group of things. It is a less radical, less extreme version of the same mechanism that is also at play in the stimulus imprint- ing. Goldstone considers as an example of this mechanism the perception of written words as units rather than as single letters that come one after another. In the musical case, I think I can point to the perception of groups of notes as small independent elements such as the perception of chords or arpeggios. Finally, attentional weighting refers to the capacity of perceivers to auto- matically drive their attention to specific aspects of a phenomenon conse- quently giving to these aspects more importance. Sportsmen playing a certain game, for example, learn to automatically pay attention to certain movements or bodily parts of their rivals to understand as quickly as possible what the others are doing. To give an example of this mechanism, Goldstone directly quotes some studies on the capacity of expert musicians to perceive relative pitch differences, namely intervals. By now, I think it should be clear that there is a problem with the idea of applying the perceptual learning explanation to the case of musical profes- sionals perceiving music. Even if all these mechanisms analyzed by psychol- ogists as mechanisms of perceptual learning can be individuated in the case of musical professionals perceiving music, they are not the mechanisms that allow perceivers to be presented with the phenomenology that I described above as emerging from the exercise of listening. The capacity of recogniz- ing chords, variations in intonations, familiar melodies, and intervals does not explain how musical professionals evaluate an interpretation, or work on an arrangement or write up a melody. Perceptual learning explains just some elements that might appear in the experience of musical professionals and might shape their phenomenology. Yet, it does not explain why there can be distinctive phenomenologies relevant for musical professionals, and 22 G. LORENZI it is not able to capture all the elements of it. For example, perceptual learning is not able to account for a musician’s appreciation of the elements of novelty when listening to a new performance and her ability to consider expressive choices made by performers in light of the overall structure of the piece as a theme and variation. In other words, I am happy to accept that perceptual learning phenomena are part of the musical professionals’ experience of music and allow for specific elements of their phenomenologies to emerge. I am also happy to consider that the exercise of the action of listening guided by know-how can both be further informed by acquired perceptual learning mechanisms and help perceptual learning to emerge (e.g., in a case such as pitch recognition, for example). Still, I take it that the Difference Thesis cannot be fully accounted for through perceptual learning and that the variety of phenom- enologies that musical professionals experience require further explanation. 6. Conclusion In this paper, I have taken seriously what I have called the Difference Thesis, namely the idea that musical professionals have distinctive perceptual experiences of music. I briefly showed how previous attempts to explain the Difference Thesis such as DeBellis’s work and accounts of cognitive penetration fail in being satisfactory. I then proposed to reconsider the Difference Thesis in the light of the notion of listening as a mental action guided by certain abilities and know-how. I moved on showing how the musical professionals’ perceptions look like and which shapes listening can assume in the experience of musical professionals. To do this, I considered cases of listening employed in musical practice and analyzed both what musical professionals do in those cases and which phenomenology they experience. At the end, I considered the idea that Perceptual Learning mechanisms could account for the Difference Thesis. Yet, I concluded that they could explain just an element of the musical professions' experience and cannot account for the phenomenology that I studied here. Notes 1. Mozart’s incredible skills would not be accounted for in a framework such as DeBellis’. 2. There is no consensus on what would count as a case of cognitive penetration either. MacPherson (2012), Footnote 3) for example, seems to consider cases of “category perception” based on the possession and employment of a concept in perception as cases of cognitive penetration, while other philosophers would not and would con- sider this a case in which perception merely has a conceptual content (a Kantian view of perception). PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 23 3. A further characterization, provided however in an overall perceptual framework where even hearing is considered partially active, is constructed by Kalderon (2017, p. 145). He understands listening in terms of “a psychological stance, sustained by a characteristic activity, where the perceiver opens themselves up, in a directed manner, to auditorily experience distal events and processes occurring in the natural environment”. I will not discuss this further here. 4. On the contrary, having propositional knowledge does not always directly entail the possession of an ability (Fantl, 2008). For example, what abilities does one have when one knows that Paris is the capital of France, or that Manchester is in England? Maybe, just the ability to reply to questions concerning the cities and states. 5. The main issue that Pratt and collaborators notice with the traditional type of aural training mostly concerns the fact that “dictation” is employed in isolation from other possible perceptual exercises and just teaches perceivers to engage with one or two elements of musical expression that, even if important, are not always relevant for all the musical practices. Narrowing down the ear-training component of musical studies to just the perception of these two musical features, musical education fails to furnish a more comprehensive picture of what is auditory perceivable in the musical context. Acknowledgments I am very grateful to Matthew Nudds, and Thomas Crowther for reading and discussing with me earlier versions of this paper. I am also thankful to Johannes Roessler for insightful comments at 2021 Warwick WIP seminar and to Giulia Martina and her Twitter WIP group for exchanges of ideas over this project. Thanks to M Andrea Gasperin for the inspiring conversations about listeners, and M Hardy Mertens for his music. Thanks to anonymous reviewers for their feedback and to my partner, Evgeny Lipatov, for his constant support over my writing process. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Funding This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [2271391]. ORCID Giulia Lorenzi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5943-7931 References Casini, C. (2007). L’Arte di Ascoltare la Musica. Bompiani. Churchland, P. M. (1988). Perceptual plasticity and theoretical neutrality: A reply to Jerry Fodor. Philosophy of Science, 55(2), 167–187. https://doi.org/10.1086/289425 24 G. LORENZI Copland, A. (1957). What to listen for in music. McGraw-Hill Book Company. Crane, T., & French, C. (2017). The problem of perception. In E. N. 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Philosophical Psychology – Taylor & Francis
Published: Jun 9, 2025
Keywords: Philosophy of music; philosophy of perception; musical performance; auditory perception