Giulia Lorenzi (Warwick) On the Distinctiveness of Listening to Music

When it comes to auditory perception, philosophers (O’Callaghan & Nudds 2009, O’Callaghan 2021) usually consider the perception of music as a distinctive case. Scruton (1997) proposes to explain the distinctiveness of musical perception through the acousmatic view, namely the idea that when we listen to a piece of music, we do so considering sounds qua sounds regardless of their sources and circumstances of production. Hamilton (2007, 2009) proposes a more nuanced view allowing sounds in music to be perceived both acousmatically and not-acousmatically. In this talk, I argue that we need to introduce a more nuanced picture of what it means to auditorily perceive something in order to get this musical case right. Following O’Shaughnessy (2000) and Crowther (2009a, 2009b), I introduce the distinction between hearing and listening proposing to explain the musical case mostly thanks to the second.