ABSTRACT
Besides the employment of Questionnaires for eliciting the personal experience of a number of more or less musical individuals, I have practised another mode of obtaining information on the subject of whether or not music has a meaning beyond itself. This method is that of collective experimentation. A number of hearers tell what passes in their minds during the performance of a given piece of music, writing while the music is going on but not communicating their remarks to one another, each schedule being closed and handed to the person conducting the experiment, by whom the contents are subsequently extracted and the convergences and divergences tabulated under the heading of the particular hearers and the particular piece of music. In this manner we obtain not the opinion, that is to say the generalised experience, of individual Answerers to my Questionnaire, but its complement and corrective, namely the individual experience elicited at the moment and vouched for by individual Answerers.
