Music, aesthetics of

4. Musical form and musical perception

Questions about the basic form of music and the nature of the perception involved in grasping music at ground level are closely intertwined. For the basic form of music is arguably that in virtue of which it is heard as music, or that which is necessarily tracked in the course of perceiving the music.

Though all agree that music is sound which is organized and apprehended in time and thus that the form of music must be both audible and temporal, there is disagreement on many further points. Some hold the fundamental form of music to be local, and to reside in moment-to-moment connections between small-scale parts, while others hold global form, governing large-scale and temporally distant sections of a piece, to be equally basic. Some regard musical form as sui generis, involving irreducible and specifically musical qualities, while others take notions, particularly spatial ones, rooted in other domains – such as balance, proportion, symmetry and overall shape – to apply directly to musical form.

Debate also flourishes concerning the nature of the fundamental musical perception by which musical form is grasped. Some philosophers think registration of even the most basic musical features, such as tones, rhythms, motifs and chords, or at least the experience of musical connectedness and movement requires either a special mode of perception, or the metaphorical projection of concepts not literally applicable to sequences of sound, or the exercise of a species of imagination; others hold such posits to be unnecessary, claiming that ordinary perception is adequate to the phenomena at hand. A compromise position about musical movement may be this: even if such movement fails to result from either metaphorical projection or aural imagining, music is heard as moving, most notably in its melodic rise and fall, harmonic progression and rhythmic propulsion, despite failing to contain anything that literally moves in the way it is heard as moving.

Currently there is much empirical work on the cognitive psychology of music worthy of the attention of philosophers, concerning principles of grouping, the grasp of melodic contour, the mechanisms of memory and attention, and the limits of sensitivity to key relationships. Also of interest is the role of unconscious processing in the perception of music, including assignment by a musical processor of syntactic or semantic structure to music as it is heard.