Whom do we hear in music?
Christopher Peacocke on the Soul in Sound
We often associate music with emotions. A piece of music, if successful, evokes emotions: we may feel wonder or horror, awe or melancholy. But we can also hear emotions and psychological states in a piece of music. We may hear joy or fear, determination, or hesitance. We may also hear the action of someone who expresses her emotions, be it a cry in anger or a sigh in despair. Whose emotions are these?
In his second lecture at College de France, Christopher Peacocke, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, moves from explaining what can be heard in music to an exploration of whom we hear
We always hear someone
Imagine lying down on the grass in a sunny meadow. You hear the buzz of bees and other insects and, far away, the soft rustling of leaves. Maybe you also hear the ripple of water, if there’s a brook nearby.
And suddenly you hear some music coming from afar. Most probably, you’d rise to your feet, trying to locate the source of the sound. What was it that made you think there is a human source? What is it about music that distinguished it from the various lovely sounds you were enjoying until that moment?
What is it in the music that makes us associate it with an agent, an acting subject? What makes us think that it’s the product of someone’s will and not a random sum of sounds?
According to Peacocke, there are two types of answers to these questions. The first is evolutionary, the second philosophical.
According to the evolutionary answer, musical notes have a discernible pitch, and it is very rare for sounds in nature to have a discernible pitch without being produced by an agent. A piece of music is built upon the orderly repetition of notes, making it extremely improbable not to have been produced by an agent. The ability to distinguish between randomly and intentionally produced sounds is evidently extremely important for any organism trying to survive. Our ability to hear music as music is only one specification of this ability to distinguish sounds.
As Peacocke points out, this perception of music as the product of an agent’s action is so entrenched in our minds that it persists even when we know that a piece of music is, for example, computer-generated. Right from the start, and inextricably so, our perception of music as music is connected with the existence of an acting subject.
An Acting subject
What about the philosophical answer? What makes us experience music as the product of someone’s actions? And why does it make a difference?
Think of any melody that you like. It sounds as if the later notes are, in a way, caused by the earlier ones. There is an apparent inevitability here: if a wrong note followed, something would be amiss and the melody would be destroyed. Peacocke tells us that there is no mysterious, unearthly causality at play here. Rather, the acting subject who produces the music intentionally puts a sequence of notes together, in order to produce the end result. The later notes are not caused by the earlier ones. They make part of the same intention. It’s similar to reading a well-written book: if the words follow one another in a way that makes sense and is pleasing to the reader, it is because the writer put them all together, to express herself.
For perceiving something as music, then, instead of some random series of sounds, it matters to us that it is the result of an intentional action. Music embodies the attempt of an acting subject to express herself. In that sense, computer-generated music challenges our very understanding of music.
The acting subject in the music
So when we hear a piece of music, we hear it as the intentional expression of an acting subject. But this is not the only way in which music is related to an acting subject. Music is not only the expression of the feelings of its creator; after all, whoever plays a happy song is not necessarily happy. Apart from the creator, we also hear a subject within the music. As any piece of music progresses, it can be heard as the first-person narrative of a persona whom we hear in the music, but whom we have the ability to differentiate from the musician, the singer, or the composer.
Peacocke calls this subject the “minimal persona” or the “minimal intentional subject.” This minimal subject is distinguished from what he calls the “program subject.” The program subject is the subject that we hear in the music once we’ve been supplied with some kind of supportive material, which provides more information on what is going on in the music.
Take, for example, the case of Hector Berlioz’ Fantastical Symphony (Symphonie Fantastique), subtitled by the artist as Episode in the Life of an Artist … in Five Sections. Reading the program, we learn that the symphony tells the story of a young musician who falls in love, suffers from heartbreak, and finally, after consuming opium, experiences a series of hallucinations. These lead from the imagined murder of his beloved to his damnation, execution, and descent into Hell. In the last part of the symphony, well-informed listeners will be dragged into the hallucinations of the young artist, the symphony’s program subject. Among others, listeners will hear the grotesque dance of witches on Sabbath, the arrival of the artist’s beloved who joins them, and funeral bells. But without the support of the program material, listeners would at most hear the feelings of terror and fright of the music’s minimal subject who experiences some unidentified, grotesque event.
In the music, we don’t only hear the actions of the minimal subject. We also hear her psychological states, which may change over the course of the musical piece, her interactions with the world, and even external events (at the last movement of Mahler’s 6th symphony, a hammer is employed to express the blows of fate falling upon the subject). And of course, as Peacocke points out, within a piece of music we can have more than one subject. A change in the actions, the emotions, or the mental states expressed in the music, therefore, adds mystery and suspense: is it the minimal subject who undergoes some change, or do we have the appearance of an extra subject? Listeners have to listen to the music closely to find out, or at least to give their interpretation to the events. In any case, what we hear in music is expressed from the first-person point of view. Even when we have depictions of the world, they remain depictions of the world as experienced by some acting subject.#
Performing and perceiving
So music is perceived as the action of an agent. It also expresses the actions, emotions, and interactions of an acting subject whom we hear in the music, the minimal subject. But we are still left with an unanswered riddle. We know from our everyday experience that our own experience of music is much stronger when we are attending a musical performance, instead of just listening to a musical recording. Listen to this aria from Händel’s oratorio The Triumph of Time and Disillusion:
And listen to it again here:
It is the exact same piece, from the same performance. But the second link includes not only sound, but also the video recording of the performance. As a result, our musical experience is significantly enhanced. The emotional content and the psychological states expressed through the music resonate within us to a greater effect. We can safely bet that the impact would be even stronger were we to attend a live performance of the event. Why does it make such a difference to see the performers play?
Again, Peacocke distinguishes between a biological and a philosophical explanation. Biologically, this observation is but a variation of the McGurk effect. As Harry McGurk and John MacDonald famously discovered in the 70s, different optical stimuli can affect our perception of sound. As the human senses work together and correct one another, what we hear can actually change, depending on what we see. It only makes sense that our visual experience would have an impact on what we hear in the music.
More interesting is the philosophical explanation of what a live performance adds to our musical perception. Peacocke suggests that, when we see the performer, we do not perceive the music merely as an expression of certain actions and emotions. We perceive it, more concretely, as actions and emotions expressed in the action of the performer. It is similar to what happens in theatre, when we watch an actor play a given role. There, we know that the actors are not the play’s characters themselves; they are merely acting as if they are. Still, every actor adds her expressive properties to the character she incarnates. Likewise, when we watch a musical performance, we attribute expressive properties of the performers to the intentional subject that we hear in the music. Every performer adds something of herself to the music that she plays. As Peacocke points out, watching Billie Holiday perform “Strange fruit” adds to the music a whole new layer of “fine-grained emotional action content,” making up for an entirely different experience from listening to anyone else perform the same song.
This has two interesting implications. The first has to do with the uniqueness of every musical performance. It is not only that every musical performer brings something different to the music, making it personal. In any single performance, even the same performers, consciously or subconsciously, may focus on different things, changing the overall effect of the music. Peacocke illustrates this through the case of Nina Simone, who characteristically sang her song “I wish I knew” in very different ways throughout her life. Listen, for example, to the 1967 cd version:
The song comes over as a political song, constituting a symbolic anthem for the Civil Rights Movement and the plight of Afro-Americans. There is a stark difference with the 1976 live version performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival:
Now, the song sounds deeply personal and inward-looking, expressing the singer’s anger and raw emotions. We realize, then, why being able to see the performer matters. How the performer stands and moves, or even the expressions that she makes, add further layers of meaning to what we hear in the music.
To this Peacocke adds a second, even more interesting observation. The overall perception of the performer affects our perception of music. But the performer is also affected by the audience. The reactions of the audience throughout the performance have an impact on the performers, affecting their performance. And the audience, in turn, is affected by this performance. Just as what we perceive is affected by the presence of the performers, what the performers perceive is affected by the presence of the audience – and the way that they perform changes accordingly, in response to an audience that may be warm, cautious, enthusiastic or dismissive. This response can make a difference, sometimes winning over an audience.
The joint awareness of the performers and the audience during the performance renders it a truly collective enterprise.
Afterword
Listening to music, then, is a rich experience that brings us in contact with several acting subjects: the creator of the music, the internal subject that we hear in the music, and, sometimes, the performers of specific musical events. Music arises as an act of self-expression, but also as an act of communication between its several acting subjects and the listener. In this communication, the role of the listener, even though limited in action, is not passive. And maybe, from the listener’s perspective, one of the things that we missed so much when we turned to the arts during the periods of quarantine was this dynamic of active participation, so different from the passive intake of artistic content. Live performances not only change our perception; they also change our role.
Listen here to Peacocke’s lecture on The Soul in Sound: https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/francois-recanati/guestlecturer-2021-05-12-16h00.htm
