Abstract

In this dissertation, I address two questions about auditory and musical experience: (1) How can music (a set of organized sounds) be heard as expressive of emotions such as sadness or happiness? (2) How are sounds (not limited to musical sounds) and their sources related to each other? Regarding the first question, my focus is on the experience of musical expression: what it is like to experience music as cheerful or anxious, for example. I argue that our so experiencing music is based on experiencing a feeling while attending to the relevant qualities of an expressive piece or passage of music. I suggest that to hear the flow and continuity of music, we feel an inner movement, and this feeling sometimes leads us to attribute emotions to music. This is a version of a so-called arousal theory of musical expression, but a merit of my proposal compared with previously defended arousal and cognitive views is that it can explain better how attending to musical properties results in hearing music as expressive. The second question of the dissertation relates to the problem of how when we hear sounds, we hear them as being of things and events in our surroundings (we can hear, for example, the sound of a metal bar being struck, a wooden door being knocked, a violin being bowed, and so on). How should we explain this relation between a sound and the thing it is a sound of? I argue that a sound is a property of an object and the event it participates in to make that sound. In other words, a sound is a complex property instantiated by an object and the relevant (sonic) event. For example, when I hear the sound of a violin being bowed, I hear properties of the instrument and properties of the bowing of the instrument’s strings in that sound. An advantage my theory has, particularly over the event and property theories of sound in the literature, is that it can explain more convincingly how sounds give us perceptual access to the things and events they are sounds of. I will also sketch a future research direction based on applying my theory of sound to explore the content of musical experience, what we hear by hearing musical sounds in a piece of music.