Listening to the Unreal: Music and Schopenhauer

Originally written for COLT 1440U The Listener with Prof. Peter Szendy.

Many of us have a strong feeling that music is somehow apart from the other arts. Music is singular among the arts in its power of penetration, the depth and ease of abstraction it permits, and its universality. Much has been said already on the aesthetic character of music and what makes it unique, but relatively little has been said about the implications for the uniqueness of the perceptual character of listening. Here, I would like to explore the implications of the aesthetics of music on the phenomenology of hearing. To do so, I will endeavor a close reading of a section of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in which he describes the power of music. By synthesizing Schopenhauer’s description with modern research on the neuroscience of listening to music and by stripping away his metaphysical and aesthetic precepts, I will attempt to translate his insights on music into insights on listening. In this way, the singularity of music among the arts can give clarity on the singularity of the act of listening among the senses.

Schopenhauer criticizes Liebniz’s interpretation of music as “an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting,” a perspective that is continuous with the earliest work on musical aesthetics such as Pythagorean analysis of harmonics as ratios. Schopenhauer points out that “if it were nothing more, the satisfaction afforded by it would inevitably be similar to that which we feel when a sum in arithmetic comes out right, and could not be that profound pleasure with which we see the deepest recesses of our nature find expression.” This seems to be an accurate description of the shortcomings of a mathematical aesthetics—it makes a category error. Our enjoyment of music is not an intellectual exercise, but a perceptual one. In other words, the component absent from the classical mathematical view on musical beauty is exactly the role the act of listening plays in the enjoyment of music.

How then can we account for Schopenhauer’s contention that music’s “distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself”? In particular, we must stress that the consumption of music is listening and thus is perception, and so what appears to transcend the world of perception is merely a case of a starkly different modality of perception. Since sight is in some ways our paradigmatic perceptual act, some properties of auditory perception seem strange or unperceptual by comparison. Crucially, the fundamental players in visual perception are physical objects that live in the real world. Our mental construction thereof is thus merely a reconstruction, as best we can make it. This is not how listening works at all. Neuroscientist Robert Zatorre stresses that “because sounds are evanescent, the brain also needs a mechanism to hold them temporarily in mind, in order to calculate pitch relationships, and other properties.” In this way, the brain’s working memory serves as a sort of ‘perceptual space’ inhabited by the objects of our auditory perception.

Because of this, when we listen we create something that is not a mere reconstruction or defective mirror of the real world. Mentally, we perceive relationships between pitches and sounds as actually existing, which is what allows us to perceive melodies as structures unto themselves (Zatorre notes that “if we did not have this capacity, covers of familiar songs would not work.”) The condition of congenital amusia demonstrates that this capacity is not inherent in the mere ability to hear individual sounds; people with the condition process notes individually fine, but are unable to internally construct the relationships between them.

Contrast this with vision, whose relational character corresponds directly to the real world. When we perceive the relations between different shapes and colors, we are mentally constructing larger structures that these units belong to, but if we have done it correctly then those structures actually exist in the real world. In listening, the objects in our internal perceptual space such as harmonies and melodies are not natural objects. They are, in one sense, the mathematical relationships that ancient aesthetics focused on.

Schopenhauer himself neared this realization when he commented that “music is perceived… in and through time alone, with absolute exclusion of space.” The effect of our biological ability to hold the evanescent sounds in place is a phenomenological aspect of listening that compresses events that happen over time into a single plane. This, then, is another ‘unreality’ possessed by musical objects as we perceive them. When we experience a melody, it is unreal both in the sense that it never exists all at once and in the sense that the relationships between its constituent parts are all our constructions.

In vision and other senses, even the relational aspect is merely targeted at real-world relations. With listening, we are able to internalize relations that are beyond the mere real world. Simultaneously, the reason that listening transcends the perceptual realm and why it is more satisfying than the idle mathematical calculation of pitch relationships is that it allows us to absorb and experience these Platonic objects for ourselves, in a way that would otherwise be impossible. We are able to feel that a note an octave higher than another has double its frequency. This abstraction, this mathematical relationship is made completely bare and obvious through perception alone in a way that is impossible for vision. This ability we possess that through listening to music we may inherently understand something that would be extremely difficult to truly understand elsewise, to truly make the abstract and mathematical organic, was appreciated by Schopenhauer as well: “music, apart from its aesthetic or inner significance, and considered merely externally and purely empirically, is nothing but the means of grasping, immediately and in the concrete, larger numbers and more complex numerical ratios that we can otherwise know only indirectly by comprehension in concepts.”

These considerations of the nature of listening then help go a long way to explain Schopenhauer’s observation that “the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.” The raw materials for visual art are things that exist in the real world: the sky, the sea, a face, a house. Even abstract visual art seems to be something that is abstracted away from representational art, rather than something built up from fundamentally abstract foundations. Music, on the other hand, is nothing before it is constructed. Lone pitches have no personality, except to the synesthetic. The beauty comes only from the relationships between them, relationships that as we have seen are objects that we create through listening. This is the real reason why Schopenhauer claims that music is “entirely without reality.” It is not abstracted away from reality, nor a distortion of it. Instead, we build it ourselves through listening from completely different stuff. In Schopenhauer’s words, music is capable of all its expression “in a homogeneous material, that is, in mere tones.” The bridge, then, between the homogeneity of pitches and the heterogeneity (in fact, the great variety) of how we feel about different pieces of music is the act that we perform between these two: listening.

Schopenhauer reproduces a quote from Aristotle: “How is it that rhythms and melodies, although only sound, resemble states of the soul?” The answer then, it seems, is that listening is a fundamentally transformative act. We take in sound that is nothing in and of itself, a completely ‘homogeneous material’ and, by listening to it, we build objects from it inside ourselves that are deeply affective. Rhythms and melodies are our own objects. They belong to the part of the listening process that happens after the sound hits our ear, the internal part. Clearly, therefore, that part of listening is deep-seated. Its products “resemble states of the soul” and therefore it must obtain its tools for shaping sound from deep within the soul.

Without diving deeply into Schopenhauer’s philosophy, it may be useful to consider why he is interested in music and how he slots it into his program. For Schopenhauer, music “immediately objectifies the will” and is “directly a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon.” We can see the myriad metaphysical presuppositions Schopenhauer takes (particularly about the Kantian thing-in-itself), but I think we can also see what Schopenhauer is driving at here behind the smokescreen of metaphysics. Once we accept that listening creates perceptual objects that are not images of reality but rather have a nature all their own, it is a very natural desire to attempt to label these objects and ascribe to them metaphysical qualities.

However, such an explanation is not necessary to account for the perceptual space of listening. It is perfectly possible that our listening-objects are merely mental constructions, although we must admit that they are a singular sort of mental construction. They need not be objectifications of things-in-themselves, but rather can be reflections and objectifications of our inner states of being. Perhaps this is even a valid interpretation of Schopenhauer himself, if we bend his meaning some when he says that music is “directly a copy of the will itself.” The ways in which listening draws out our inner states, then, is deeply related to another biological facet of listening: its relationship to patterns.

A large part of the reason our experience of music is possible is the deeply pattern-oriented nature of auditory perception. Zatorre writes that when we listen to music we are engaging our system of listening which involves the capacity to “analyze sound patterns and make predictions about them” which in turn interacts with our more general mental system for patterns which “evaluates the outcomes of these predictions and generates positive (or negative) emotions depending on whether the expectation was met, not met, or exceeded.”

Thus, we can understand that when Schopenhauer says that when a man listens to music, it is “profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language” as being an expression of these deeply-rooted patterns. The connection between musical enjoyment and pattern fulfillment and subversion is at this point well-established scientifically, but this of course does not involve an explanation of what these patterns actually are. The entire ever-expanding field of music theory can be seen as a piece of the puzzle of explicating this “universal language.” Of course, the patterns at play here are atavistic ones that we are not provided with an explanation for. They are somehow coded into our phenomenological experience of listening. Music theory can thus be seen as one specific angle from which we can view the internal structure of listening, one small slice of the strange perceptual space that the things we hear inhabit inside us.

This focus on patterns that make themselves obvious only through the subconscious is reminiscent of natural language, another complex system that seemingly relies on structure deeply hardwired into our brains. In fact, considerable neuroscience research has gone into the relationship between music and language, in particular between musicality and language learning, with evidence suggesting that one can bolster the other. This should perhaps come as no surprise. After all, as pointed out in a paper by Tallal and Gaab, “music and speech represent the most cognitively complex uses of acoustic information by humans and both take advantage of dynamic modulation of acoustic parameters.” In other words, both listening to music and listening to speech involve the creation of mental constructs from homogeneous sonic raw materials. The comparison between music and language thus can be put towards explaining not only their shared universality, but also the nature of listening as an act of internal building noted above.

Because of the prevalence now of written language, it is easy to forget the intimacy of the connection between speech and language. Writing is neither as natural nor as direct an expression of language as the spoken word. Visually, our representations are either pictorial, or else we use glyphs to represent sounds which in turn (combine to) represent concepts. In other words, the written word necessarily uses the spoken word as an intermediary. The cohesion between listening and language is a direct byproduct of the perceptual space account of listening I have previously discussed. Words and sentences are ultimately objects in that space created by transforming sounds through the act of listening. The analogy then between music and natural language is more than just metaphorical. There is a scientific basis to Schopenhauer’s claim that “music is the language of feeling and of passion, just as words are the language of reason,” and the connection between the two is their shared use of the act of listening.

However, even if the universality of music can be explained by reference and comparison to the universality of language, it still has a mysterious quality. Music’s status as the “language of feeling and passion” seems incongruent with our description of it so far as an innate faculty of pattern recognition that allows one to grasp ungraspable mathematics. One might expect that music would be rigid and lifeless from this characterization, when it is the exact opposite. Schopenhauer anticipated this line of thought when he clarified that “its universality is by no means that empty universality of abstraction.” It is astounding that music can at once contain all these abstractions and yet also be so personal.

The biological commentary this provides about hearing and listening at least partially stems from the fact that “music activates the entire limbic system, which is involved in processing of emotions and in controlling memory” (Jäncke.) A study by Särkämö et al observed that “everyday music listening can facilitate the recovery of cognitive functions and mood after a stroke.” In this way we can begin to see hints of a scientific reconstruction of the final, internal construction steps of listening. The engagement that listening to music has with our internal emotional and cognitive processing systems is a clear demonstration of how much is involved in the act. We need not listen intentionally, actively, or closely. We need not make an effort to think about what we are listening to. The act of listening itself, even passive listening, engages our internal mental systems precisely because the internal construction of the perceptual auditory image is a non-optional step of the listening process.

However, there is still mystery in the way in which music engages emotion because it seems so underdetermined. When Schopenhauer begins to describe exactly how “the change of half a tone, the entrance of a minor third instead of a major, at once and inevitably forces on us an anxious and painful feeling, from which we are again delivered just as instantaneously by the major” or how an “adagio in the minor key reaches the expression of the keenest pain, and becomes the most convulsive lament” it immediately feels trite and stale. The immense variability both within a particular musical form with respect to the emotions it elicits and across different people reacting to the same piece of music almost moots this genre of analysis at the outset.

Even Schopenhauer seems to be vaguely aware of this, however. He qualifies his analysis by saying that “we must never forget when referring to all these analogies I have brought forward, that music has no direct relation to them, but only an indirect one; for it never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself, of every phenomenon, the will itself.” Not only is music not representational in the sense that it cannot depict objects that belong to the world, it cannot even depict emotions directly. Although there is some consensus about some songs being sorrowful and some being cheerful, the exact nature of the emotional nature of music seems underdetermined by the music itself. In other words, the only way to know how some piece of music will make you feel is by listening and feeling.

This is yet another constructive aspect of listening. In particular, the way in which affective emotional states come out the other end of listening to music depends not just on the music but on the listener and the listening. The similarities between the internal states that listening constructs for us from the music and emotions is mercurial. What those internal objects look like specifically is not an exact science. Unlike a Rorschach test or a metaphorical painting, this construction is not interpretive. The sad emotion that a painting of a tragedy produces in us can vary from person to person, but the variance will be due to our associations with the particular events depicted. Interpretive context will crucially shape our experiences. Paintings can serve as mirrors, reflecting preconceived notions we hold dear back at us and using them to shape our perceptions.

This seems to not be reflective of the differences in listening. Interpretive differences seem to be crucially about the meaning and context in which the visual art operates, but differences in our perceptions of music are much more chaotic than that. It is not differences in the higher-order act of interpreting the music that cause us to feel differently, but differences in the basic act of perceiving the music. In other words, how we listen is unique to us. In particular, the part of listening that I have so far described, the constructive part, contains traces of our particular humanity in it, whatever it may be that uniquely makes each human, be it soul, will, élan vital, or something else. The ways in which listening to music stimulates the parts of the brain leaves a limbic fingerprint that identifies us.

When we invariably interpret things differently, it is not each person’s unique élan, but their unique circumstances, experiences, and outlook that is the determining factor. There is thus an impurity not present in music. Note how Schopenhauer distinguishes between a particular emotion that a painting elicits (for example, a painting of the crucifixion of Jesus elicits a particular sorrow, the sorrow of that particular tragedy and sacrifice) as compared to the emotion itself that music elicits: “music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for them.” The magic of listening comes in the following sentence: “nevertheless, we understand them perfectly in this extracted quintessence.”

The above phenomenon reflects again the strange dual nature of listening. At the same time, we have characterized music as speaking to something more pure and abstract than visual art, but it is also more deeply personal. The fact that music is incapable of singling out particular, nuanced, concrete emotions or making us engage with detailed scenarios counterintuitively increases its emotional power. When musical emotion gains nuance, it does so not by changing sorrow into the sorrow of the Crucifixion, but by transforming sorrow into an ineffable mix of sorrow and other pure emotions. When music, especially sophisticated music, moves us we can almost never describe the way in which it does so. The music causes us to feel emotion, but it is a pure emotion that we recognize internally, rather than a concretized emotion attached to a specific real world objector event, that is imposed on us externally.

What, then, does this mean for listening? It provides insight on a further consideration of the Aristotelian question of how listening can make things that are “only sound resemble states of the soul.” The listening-constructions, the inhabitants of the internal perceptual space, do resemble states of the soul. However, the resemblance is in and of itself of an abstract nature. In other words, listening does not fashion everyday sorrow or joy from sound. Instead, it sculpts sound into abstracted and purified versions of emotions. This again gives some insight into both the sculpting process and its results. Listening creates musical objects in and of themselves inside us and, along with them, affective states that stand in close relation to our everyday emotions, but are neither examples or facsimiles of them.

Let us sum up our contentions about listening and music. The objects of music, its melodies, harmonies, textures, etc. are not objects that belong to the real world. However, these things are the principal objects of our listening when we listen to music. They are what we perceive. This fact, that we are perceiving the strictly unreal when we listen, leads us to a conception of listening as a fundamentally constructive act. Listening constructs its objects of focus by taking its raw input, the “homogenous material” of sound, and compressing it diachronically as well as realizing relationships between its different parts. These relationships, which listening makes real for us, combined with the deep-seated connection between listening and the human desire for pattern recognition, creates affective states from these listening-objects. In other words, our feelings, emotions, limbic brain cells are aroused by subconscious attitudes listening invokes towards its creations. In this way, sound, that when considered alone is completely devoid of meaning and feeling of its own, is able to move us. This perceptual process is starkly different from that of vision. We do not take in a dim, projected copy of the outside world when we listen like we do when we see. We are instead somehow in contact with something beyond or apart from the world. If we listen well, we realize the unreal inside ourselves.

This description of listening is the ultimate answer to how, for Schopenhauer, music “tries to shape that invisible, yet vividly aroused, spirit-world that speaks to us directly, to clothe it with flesh and bone, and thus to embody it.” Listening is embodying. With this in mind, perhaps we can go about our lives with a fresh perspective on listening. When we have strong feelings about what we hear, we might surrender to them, knowing they reflect things we have embodied that we could not otherwise understand.

Works Cited

Jäncke, L. (2008). “Music, memory and emotion.” Journal of Biology 7(6): 21. https://doi.org/10.1186/jbiol82

Särkämö, T., M. Tervaniemi, S. Laitinen, A. Forsblom, S. Soinila, M. Mikkonen, et al. (2008). “Music listening enhances cognitive recovery and mood after middle cerebral artery stroke.” Brain 131(3): 866–876.

Schopenhauer, A. (1969). The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover.

Tallal, P., and N. Gaab (2006). “Dynamic auditory processing, musical experience and language development.” Trends in Neurosciences 29(7): 382–390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2006.06.003

Zatorre, R. J. (2018). “Why Do We Love Music?” Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science 2018: cer-16-18.