ABSTRACT

The study of musical aesthetics has been complicated by the difficulty of articulating what listening experiences are really like. People can be powerfully moved by music, yet almost entirely incapable of describing their percepts and sensations. Philosophers have grappled with this resistance to verbalization, characterizing aspects of music listening as ineffable (Raffman, 1993) or nonconceptual (DeBellis, 1995), or pointing to the primacy of attentive engagement within the perceptual present over explicit awareness of larger-scale structural relationships (Levinson, 1998). Yet it is precisely this resistance to articulation that makes psychology such a powerful method for investigating musical aesthetics. By designing thoughtful and sensitive experiments, researchers can coax out implicit evidence of the processing involved in aesthetic perception, without relying on participants’ ability to verbalize them. In this way, not only can philosophical theories make aesthetic experiences more susceptible to empirical investigation, but also empirical investigation can provide insights that inform new philosophical theories in aesthetics. This interplay between theory and experimentation is particularly crucial for domains—like musical aesthetics—where scientific understanding is at a relatively early stage.