Dear Philosophers, I wanted to announce a guest talk in the Faculty of Philosophy.
The details are as follows: *The speaker*: Jenny Judge (Cambridge). Jenny is a PhD student in the Music Faculty working on philosophy of music and music perception. *Title*: Is Music Multimodal or Cross-modal? *Time & Place:* Tuesday, June 11th, 4.30 pm Faculty Board Room. *Abstract:* The philosophy of music has traditionally assumed that music is a matter for hearing alone. Kivy (1991) describes music as an 'art of pure sonic design'; Davies (1994) says that philosophical questions about music ought to be understood as relating to a 'world of musical sound'. Even when music arises in the philosophy of perception, it is treated as a corollary of auditory perception (Scruton 2009). However, music is performed as well as listened to; performers must necessarily coordinate their actions with an instrument, as well as those of other performers, in order to produce music at all. Moreover, empirical evidence from music psychology suggests that, even when we are 'just' listening to music, our experience may be multimodal rather than unimodal. The results seem to indicate that music may count as evidence against the 'composite snapshot' picture of perception, whereby perception is considered to be the combinatorial aggregate of outputs of discrete sensory modalities. However, confusion surrounds the terminology that is employed by psychologists to characterise the sensory interactions implicated in music. In particular, the terms 'multi-modal' and 'cross-modal' are often used interchangeably. It is unclear whether the combination of processing from discrete sensory organs is what is under investigation, or whether the research indicates that there exist, in the case of music, some more fundamental interactions between the sensory systems. This is a problem noted by Macpherson (2011), who introduces a taxonomy of cross-modal experiences in order to better characterise the different senses that the term 'cross-modal' could mean. Macpherson, however, does not discuss results from music psychology. In this paper, I attempt to fit some candidate cases for cross-modal perception from music psychology into Macpherson's taxonomy, highlighting some puzzles that the results seem to raise, particularly in regard to her initial criteria for individuating the senses. Hope to see you there! Best, Paulina
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