Giorgia Carli
Trinity College Dublin
My paper advances a necessarily non-acousmatic thesis of musical listening, which relates musical listening necessarily to non-acoustic properties and sound sources (i.e. human agency). To do so, I distinguish music perception from musical listening. The former is a perceptual experience relying on the perceptual objects, like sounds and sound sources, that we hear when we hear music. The latter is an aesthetic experience relying on the sensory properties we attend to when listening to music. Unlike perceptual objects, sensory properties are perceptible insofar as they belong to perceptual objects. The objects of music perception thus inform the properties available in musical listening.
With this distinction in mind, I reject Scruton’s acousmatic thesis of musical listening, which relates musical listening to acoustic properties and sounds. Scruton’s acousmatic thesis rests on the “separation claim” (SC) that we perceive sounds as music by ignoring their sources. Music perception thus only has sounds as its objects, which justifies the exclusively acoustic properties of musical listening. I reject SC through the co-articulation of speech perception. I argue that Scruton’s melodic organisation of perceived musical sounds parallels the co-articulation of acoustic and non-acoustic properties in speech sounds. On this basis, I argue that, insofar as music has a source (i.e. human agency), we cannot ignore it in music perception. Therefore, both sounds and sound sources are objects of music perception.
This further means that both acoustic and non-acoustic properties are available to us in musical listening. I argue that, in musical listening, we attend to one property: temporal regularity. Temporal regularity arranges the co-articulated acoustic and non-acoustic properties of perceived musical sounds into regularly occurring intervals. This makes us anticipate the unfolding of musical sounds, which, in turn, elicits our aesthetic responses to them. Temporal regularity, however, is a product of choice: somebody chose to arrange sounds in a temporally regular way. Accordingly, temporal regularity is a non-acoustic property of human agency (i.e. the source of musical sounds). Our musical listening is thus inseparable from sound sources. In other words, musical listening is necessarily non-acousmatic.
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SOPhiA 2026 