On Experiencing Music from Within

Abstract Experiencing the emotion in a piece of music “from within” involves imagining feeling that emotion, but just what does one imagine, and why? It has been suggested that one imagines, of one’s experience of hearing the sounds, that it is one’s feeling the emotion. This suggestion, it is argued here, is unworkable. A better idea is that one imagines oneself to be expressing one’s emotion in the sounds of the music. But imagining, by itself, is subject to few constraints; it is possible, with enough effort, to listen to an anxious piece of music, and imagine oneself expressing one’s joy through it. To vindicate the idea, then, the constraints under which one imagines when one listens “from within” must be described. It is argued that one imagines feeling, for example, sad when listening to sad music from within, because one begins by imagining one’s hearing the sounds to be one’s perceiving one’s own behavior, and then allows this imaginative episode to unfold involuntarily. An imagining that one feels sad is then generated, in part, by an offline-running of one’s disposition to infer what emotion one feels from internal perceptions of one’s behavior.