Episode 24: Christopher Peacocke discusses the perception of music

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Elucidations 31 min 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 2 hours ago

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What is the central question about hearing emotion in music?

Matt Teichman 0:12

Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman.

Jamie Edwards 0:25

And I'm Jamie Edwards.

Matt Teichman 0:28

With us today is Christopher Peacock, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and he's here to talk to us about the perception of music. Christopher Peacock, welcome. Thank you. So one of the things we're going to talk about today is what the experience of hearing an emotional state in a musical piece is. What is it to hear sadness in a piece of music? What is it to hear joy expressed in a piece of music? Now, you might think that our hearing emotion in a piece of music is the result of some sort of cultural convention. Like, I understand that such and such minor chord is supposed to denote sadness, because that's the way the convention works in the music that I grew up hearing. It's through my understanding of a cultural convention that I hear a minor chord in a piece of music as being sad.

Matt Teichman 1:14

So do you think that's the way that this sort of thing works? Or is there other problems with that idea?

Christopher Peacocke 1:19

Okay, so let's distinguish two questions here. One question is whether the culture has some kind of causal impact on the perceptual states you enjoy when you hear a particular chord or a particular piece of music. The other question is whether on a particular occasion when you hear the piece of music, whether what you just said holds, that your understanding of the cultural conventions is what produces the perceptual state. The first thing to be said about this is the fact that cultural conventions are relevant to somebody's relation to a particular auditory event doesn't mean that the state they're in, in the presence of that event, doesn't mean it isn't perceptual. The clearest case of this is language.

Christopher Peacocke 2:00

It's obviously a cultural convention that the words mean what they do. The words mean one thing here, mean something different somewhere else. But the mature understander of the language still hears the words as having a particular meaning when they're uttered on a particular occasion. That's a perceptual state. It's not a result of personal level conscious inference. You hear the utterance of the word snow as meaning snow in a particular context on a particular occasion. The fact that it does mean snow and the fact you hear it as meaning snow, the first is explained by all sorts of facts concerning the use of the word in this particular linguistic community. The fact that you perceive it as meaning snow on a particular occasion is explained by your induction into this community, your exposure to many utterances of the word in this community, and indeed your understanding of it.

Christopher Peacocke 2:41

It's still a perceptual phenomenon. So what I'm interested in is really not the causal origins of this state, but the nature of the perceptual state itself, what it is for it to have this emotional content.

Matt Teichman 2:52

Okay, right. So in other words, there's a difference between saying that whenever I hear some piece of music as sad, I'm doing so because I'm applying some kind of cultural convention and saying that, well, the way I'm wired, so to speak, to hear things now is a result of my cultural upbringing. But those are two different claims. Correct.

3:09

Yeah.

Jamie Edwards 3:10

So your account identifies three distinct sorts of experiences or ways of seeing. The first is simply experiencing something to be a certain way, as when I see an apple on the table as an apple. The second sort of experiencing is seeing something as a representation of something else. When all is going well, I do not confuse a still life painting of an apple with the apple itself. I see the still life as a representation.

How do cultural conventions influence our perception of musical emotions?

Christopher Peacocke 3:35

Yep.

Jamie Edwards 3:37

The third variety of experience, the one crucial for your account of the perception of expression in music, you call metaphorical seeing as. Would you describe this sort of experience for us?

Christopher Peacocke 3:49

Yes. I think there's a general cognitive phenomenon that's present in many different kinds of mental states, a phenomenon of representing one thing as something else. So I think you can perceive one thing as something else.