ABSTRACT
Music can be handled in two different ways: one is dealing with the music as it unfolds through time, as a kind of sonorous articulation, with actual sounds that can be perceived in an objective manner; the other is dealing with music at the level of imagination with the sounds sounding only at a virtual level. Imagery in fact is usually defined as the occurrence of a perceptual sensation in the absence of the corresponding perceptual input (Kosslyn, 1980; Le Ny, 1994). It is possible, however, to have imaginative projections in the presence of perceptual input as well. Imagery, then, is coperceptual rather than purely autonomous. As such, it holds a position between the epistemological paradigms of realism and nominalism, that stress either the sensory ‘realia’ or the imaginative reconstructions of these realia in the listener’s mind. As I will try to show, this distinction, that is traditionnally conceived of as a dichotomy, can be weakened in favour of a combined approach of both sensory processing and imaginative reconstruction of the mind.
