“Feeling the Beat”
Jenny Judge · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019
Chapter 4 argues that the experience of musical meter (distinguished from musical rhythm) is multimodal: it involves the binding to a common sensory individual of auditory and proprioceptive content. Consideration of this multimodal content offers a novel perspective on the experience of musical movement. Some philosophers have suggested that all perceptual experiences of musical movement must be “metaphorical” (which notion is explained in the chapter), given that musical sounds do not move. But if a given type of musical experience involves more than the awareness of sounds, it does not follow that the experience of movement must be metaphorical in that case. The author claims that since the proprioceptive content involved in beat experience is legitimately movement-involving, it is unnecessary to appeal to “metaphorical perception” to explain the experience of movement in musical meter.