Imagination and the Mind's Ear

Abstract

This dissertation provides an analysis of the phenomenon of musical imagery, or the internal 'hearing' of music. I uphold the view that musical imagery, as a kind of auditory imagery, is a kind of sensory or perceptual imagination, and cannot be incorporated into a propositional model of imagination. I further argue that musical imagery differs in important respects both from visual imagery and from other types of auditory imagery, such as inner speech. For this reason, this project makes a contribution to what would be a larger project (not necessarily carried out by a single researcher) of analyzing the sensory or perceptual imagination through careful comparative work in each sensory modality and their various combinations. Chapter 1 provides the background on theories of imagination necessary in order to make this argument, and demonstrates the lack of attention currently paid to auditory imagination in general and musical imagination in particular. The analysis of musical imagery then proceeds from three points of view: phenomenological, conceptual or analytical, and empirical. The goal of Chapter 2 is to describe our subjective experiences of musical imagery. While this description is a description of the phenomenological aspects of our experiences, it is not an example of work in phenomenology proper, as practiced by the followers of Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger. Rather, the method is necessarily first person, but appeals to the idea that musical imagery experiences occur along a spectrum of possible abilities. That is, while there is too much variation among reports of subjective musical imagery, it still makes sense to appeal to a kind of normal imaginative experience, and, as a result, the reliance on introspection does not result in hopeless idiosyncrasies. Chapter 3 discusses four topics related to content of musical imagery. First, I address the question of what makes auditory imagination specifically auditory; second, I examine the relationship between auditory imagination and imagining hearing; third, I address questions about the ontology of sounds and the ontology of music in the context of my claims about auditory imagination; finally, I discuss whether the contents of musical imagery, as a type of auditory imagination, should be thought of as conceptual or nonconceptual. Chapter 4 addresses the question of the ontology of the mental image, discussed both by Gilbert Ryle and by participants in the mental imagery debate in the field of psychology. Having demonstrated that scientific inquiry into the mechanisms of mental imagery does not involve commitment to ontologically problematic mental entities, I then survey empirical work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience that sheds light on the neural underpinnings of musical imagery. By way of conclusion, I discuss methodological issues regarding the integration of historical, empirical, conceptual, and phenomenological I use to develop a theory of musical imagery as sensory imagination.