This week, the seminar will discuss Giulia Lorenzi's paper How to Make Sense of Different Musical Perceptual Experiences: a New Philosophical Proposal. Guilia will be interviewed by Johannes Roessler

 Abstract:

The common-sense intuitive idea that a musician with extended musical knowledge can perceive music in a different way than a naïve listener seems both appealing and problematic. Indeed, given the standard understanding of perception in the philosophical realm as the theory-neutral apprehension of information, it is not clear how musical knowledge can inform and enhance perception of music. In this paper, I suggest that we need to rethink how we characterise auditory perception to make sense of different musical perceptual experiences. Following O’Shaughnessy (2000) and Crowther (2009), I introduce the distinction between listening and hearing. I then show how considering listening as an action makes possible to explain two different components at play in musical training and music perception: a mere perceptual one and a theoretic-perceptual other. I finally show, how the attempts previously made in philosophy to characterise this experience fails to explain some crucial aspects of this case.