Music listeners, philosophers, and researchers

Relationships between philosophy and science have ranged from Wittgenstein's view that cognitive science has nothing to offer the understanding of art to the view that science is in the process of eliminating the need for philosophy [1]. Taking a middle approach, I wish to base my brief comments on Juslin's excellent article with an expansion of a seemingly innocuous statement, “And, it is the listener's criteria that count, if our goal is to explain actual responses to music” [2]. Fig. 1 provides a graphical way of illustrating how we might arrive at a more coordinated and coherent view of musical and aesthetic emotions by combining insights gleaned from music listeners, philosophers, and researchers, using the BRECVEMA model. Imagine a highly trained musician who agrees with Stravinsky when he said, “Do we not, in truth, ask the impossible of music when we expect it to express feelings?” [3]. Philosophers might label our highly trained musician a Formalist, and using the BRECVEMA model, researchers might find support for this position in the mechanism of Musical Expectancy which is supported by specific brain regions [2, Table 2]