The Cognitive Mechanism of Music

Abstract

Music clearly has a mathematical structure. From the ancient Pythagoreans we know that harmony is the mathematical ratio between the notes (the frequencies as has been discovered by physics). This operation can be performed by the brain which has been seen as a kind of computer by the philosophy of mind of the last decades. And it is an unconscious operation. The conscious presentation of music contains the intervals as phenomenal components, yet not in a mathematical form, obviously, but in a sensorial form, alongside the notes themselves. The experience of music must contain the intervals as cognitions (in the sense that they have phenomenal form), otherwise no music would be possible at all. The phenomenological structure of harmony shows us the notes themselves in the foreground but the intervals in the background that we can still hear and experience it fused with the notes. The experience of the intervals are also not the emotions that music evokes in us - though they are definitely connected in some ways by the neural circuits of the brain and compose further phenomenological structures.