Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-k7p5g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T13:25:39.821Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Apprehension and Cognition of Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Get access

Extract

When we listen to a piece of music, whether it be a fugue by Bach, a song by Schubert, or a symphony by Beethoven, the actual physical, objective, stimuli which reach our ears consist of incredibly complicated pulsations of air pressure. These produce equally complicated vibrations of the tympanum or ear-drum, and so set up successions of nervous impulses in the brain. But our subjective experience of the music, the thing that we actually hear, consists of a logical and meaningful sequence of harmoniously interrelated auditory impressions, possessing form and unity both as a whole and in detail. How then does this series of discrete air vibrations, which are produced by the musical instruments or voices of the performers, become transformed and organised into the mental thing that we call music? In other words, what is the psychological nature of our perception or cognition of music?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1932

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Music and Its Lovers. London: Allen & Unwin, 1932.Google Scholar