Music impacts the senses, specifically the ears. What gets absorbed is experienced as feeling. Although the feeling might only be one of indifference, when music fulfils its purpose it is usually stronger than that. Responses to it might span the spectrum from disgust to rapture.

There is often an attempt to describe music feelings in words but due to the limitations of available vocabulary the attempt misses the mark. Instead of describing these feelings accurately a pseudo-objective description of the music itself is offered up. If done by one articulate and knowledgeable the description can be convincing. What emerges might be a plausible account of said piece.

I wonder about that. After all, music is itself only a contrived form of air movement to produce a set of vibrations which act on the ear and brain. The verbal critique might be imaginative enough and delivered with erudition but ultimately it is only metaphor. At best it is just an expressing of the emotion felt by the sound experience. The attempt at objectivity is a pretence, a form of essentialism. Stripped down it is little more than a language convention.

That is not the perceived wisdom. If an appraisal compares favourably with what the music makes others feel too, even roughly, then the supposed description holds sway. Opinion determines quality. Sheer numbers propel a piece of music toward acceptance. It is then a culturally shared thing. It becomes something inter-subjective. And that I think is as good as it gets if one is looking for some truths about the music experience.

Often it is isn’t even as good as that however. At a concert when an audience is uplifted, presumably those present are feeling the same thing. Yet if they were all asked individually to express these feelings then different stories would be told. All the vagaries of language and forms of expression would complicate the matter. The lack of a vocabulary of the emotions would compound that. Something different would be described by each, something individual and separate. The collective experience would then appear to be not quite so shared after all, yet back in the moment of performance it seemed it had.

Developing a vocabulary that acknowledges the inter-subjectivity of emotional experience would enhance shared awareness. That would be itself an indication of an emergent emotional intelligence and a common pool of understanding. In philosophical terms, such intelligence and the associated knowledge would be relative to the psychological and subjective processes of the human mind but in another sense such knowledge would be close to absolute in that it is as much as is possible. A ceiling has been reached. A set of widely held attitudes and insights into what the emotions do would have been arrived at. It would represent a move of paradigm from pseudo-objectivity to inter-subjectivity.